


Such Things Don't Bear Repeating

by Allizane



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Bondage, Harry Potter - Freeform, M/M, Magic, Mates, Non-Negotiated D/s Elements, Orphan Stiles, POV Multiple, Past Child Abuse - Physical, Rimming, dark!stiles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-20
Updated: 2013-07-20
Packaged: 2017-12-20 20:08:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/891341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allizane/pseuds/Allizane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A wizard, a wolf, and a boy. Or: spells and magic can never truly substitute for strength. (Harry Potter AU, in triplicate.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Drafted during hiatus, so no S3 characters make an appearance. Except for Stiles’ hair.

**Wizard.**

The shrill ringing sound is so incongruous it takes him a moment to realize what it signifies. Minerva McGonagall pauses in her speech — while she won’t disagree that changes need to be made, she refuses to go so far as to start teaching her students Muggle science — and looks curiously at him from the fireplace.

“Is that a telephone?”

“Indeed it is, Headmistress,” he says. “As you can see, I practice what I preach. We’ll have to continue this later.”

He throws a handful of powder at the logs with one hand while grasping for the phone receiver with the other. It’s buried under a pile of scrolls and papers, but he manages to find it before the ringing stops.

“Dr. Deaton. To whom am I speaking?”

There’s a pause on the other end, as though the caller wasn’t really expecting anyone to answer.

“I, uh, yes, this is, ah — Isabella, from the Children’s Home?”

He thinks for a moment. There was an Isabella at the Beacon Hills Children’s Home in California; a thin blonde woman with nervous hands.

“Isabella! How wonderful to hear from you,” he says. “I hope everything has been going well since our meeting.”

“Ah, yes, um, thank you, it’s just, uh — you said, when you were here, you told me that I should call you if one of the children ever did anything — odd, you said — like, unnatural-like, and, well — ”

He’s already reaching for the suit jacket he keeps in his office for emergencies. “Say no more, Isabella; I’ll be there in an hour or two.”

“Oh, well, that’s, um, okay then, I’ll — I’ll just get him ready for you, I guess?”

“Much obliged, Isabella,” he says, then carefully places the phone down before throwing off his robes and tugging on the suit jacket, fingers snagging on the buttons. In theory, he could be at the Home in the next minute, but Apparating from Maine to California is a risky proposition at the best of times, and the quick journey would arouse suspicion as well. Better to Portkey to Sacramento, find a nearby car rental and drive the last 50 miles.

In his hurry to leave, he almost forgets to grab the wand off his desk.

***

He pulls up at the Home exactly two hours after the phone call, slowly parking the black sedan in the gravel lot out front. It’s a gray and sad-looking place, but he supposes that’s inevitable when you’re dealing with unwanted children.

Isabella is standing on the front porch by the time he exits the car. There’s a pale, skinny child of indeterminate age and gender perched on the railing, eyes hidden by a thick mop of brown hair.

“Hello,” he says, smiling. “How wonderful to see you again. And this is — ?”

Isabella bites her lip, frowns. “Inside,” she says. “We should — inside.”

She goes through the door and leads him to a small room at the end of the hall. He wonders briefly where everyone else is, but is wary of asking questions that a Muggle would see no need for. 

The room holds a filing cabinet, a desk and three chairs. Only the child sits, head bowed low and fingers twitching against thighs.

“You said — you hinted,” Isabella stutters out, “When you were here, you — ”

“Yes, I remember,” he says. “And as promised..." He reaches into his jacket pocket; pulls out a small stack of bills. “First, however, I’ll need a few minutes alone with the” — _him_ , she’d said — “with this young gentleman here.”

“He can’t speak,” she says, gaze following the money in his hand. “He — whoever had him last, they — his tongue’s been cut out.”

The room is silent apart from the rasp of small fingertips against denim.

“And...who exactly had him last?” he finally manages to ask.

She shrugs her shoulders; a sharp, jilted motion. “Angus found him lying with the dogs near the train yard when he went to throw them some scraps; called up the cops and they brought him here. Said no one was looking for him. He’s been here a week, hasn’t tried to write or sign anything. He — I knew I had to call you, after he — ”

“After he what, Isabella?” he prompts gently.

She nods towards the window. “We have a pond out back. Filled with all sorts of weird looking fish, all different colors.”

“And?”

“We didn’t before,” she says.

And that’s — just not possible, on several different levels.

“They’re not real,” she says. “The fish, I mean. Or — they go through your hand, when you try to catch them, but they look up at you, like — like they know you’re there. So they’re not fake.”

“I see,” he says, even though he honestly doesn’t.

“But that’s not — that’s not why I called,” she says. “I wanted to, kept picking up the phone ready to dial, but I — I couldn’t make my fingers press the right buttons. Almost like, like it didn’t want me to.” She licks her lips, glances furtively at the window. “Then, the other day, some of the older boys were pushing him around, calling him names — kid stuff, you know — and then they just started coughing, coughing up — blood, the whole yard — splattered, and they all...” She trails off, pauses. “We had to call an ambulance.”

He looks at the child again. A bit small to have put several boys in the hospital, but sometimes things happened. It’s bad, but not irredeemable.

“He can’t stay here,” Isabella says. “You — you have somewhere to put him, you said?”

There’s no response he can give that won’t lead to more questions, and he’s anxious to get back to the Academy. It’s cool here, this far north, but he can already feel the sweat beading at the base of his neck.

“There’s no need to worry,” he says, and pulls the wand from his sleeve. He whispers the spell, waits until her eyes glaze over and her breathing slows.

“Come along, then,” he tells the boy. “Show me your pond.”

He feels almost bad, watching it curl into itself with a faint shimmer, but the boy doesn’t protest and follows him easily enough to the car.  

He slips the cash into Isabella’s coat pocket, then sends a quick message to the Aurors, letting them know that Beacon Hills was in dire need of some memory spells without providing too many details.

It’s an awkward, silent drive to Sacramento. The Portkey is still lying in the alley, right where he left it, and the boy reaches out for the old sneaker unprompted.

His fingers barely have a chance to brush against its surface before they both disappear.

***

He takes the boy to his suite of rooms in the dorms. There are questions that need answering, but first —

“Drink,” he says, holding out a small bottle. The boy looks at him warily from under his bangs, sitting on the edge of the sofa.

“It’ll grow your tongue back,” he says. “It shouldn’t hurt.”

The boy doesn’t move.

“If you don’t drink it I won’t be able to teach you about magic,” he adds, and that’s enough to convince the boy to open his mouth and swallow the potion.

“And it makes you fall asleep while it’s healing you,” he says, but the boy’s already slumped over, out cold.

***

In the morning he makes pancakes. The smell draws the boy off the couch and into the kitchen.

“You’ll need to tell me your name if you want any,” he says.

The boy considers him for a moment.

“Stiles.”

It’s mumbled, but he hears it well enough.

“I meant your full name,” he says.

The boy — Stiles — sits at the table. “Should’ve specified.”

And — all right, he can grant him that.

He brings the platter of pancakes over and watches as Stiles rolls one up and stuffs it in his mouth without bothering to add any syrup.

“Where are your parents?” he asks.

Stiles ignores him and reaches for another pancake, glaring when he moves the platter away.

“Dead,” Stiles says. “Obviously.”

“When did they die?”

Stiles’ mouth twists to the side, fingers drumming against the table’s surface. “Two years ago, I guess.”

He lets him have another pancake. This one, the boy drowns in syrup on his plate.

“And how old are you, Stiles?”

“Nine in September, why?” The words come out garbled from behind a mouthful of food.

“I’m afraid you won’t be able to begin your wizarding lessons for another two years, then. We start our students off when they’re eleven. It’s the same age as the other schools but we try and keep you for two years longer, so if you get the full degree you’ll be able to attend a Muggle university, if you want.”

He doesn’t really know why he’s giving the boy his marketing spiel. It’s not like Stiles is going to suddenly demand to attend one of the more traditional schools.

“What’s a Muggle?” Stiles asks.

“Someone who doesn’t know about magic,” he says. “Like Isabella, back at the Home.”

Stiles goes back to eating.

“I take it your parents weren’t wizards?”

No answer, but if the child hasn’t heard the term Muggle before, that’s telling enough. Which means — 

“How did you know the sneaker was a Portkey, back in that alley yesterday?”

Stiles looks up him, swallows.  “You knew what it was, too.”

“Yes, because I’d used it before. How did you — ?"

“Oh,” says Stiles, tilting his head to the side. “Huh.”

“What is it?”

“Full now,” Stiles says, sliding off the chair and ambling back to the couch.

***

He spends a full month trying to get Stiles to tell him what happened before he came to the Home, but none of his usual methods for questioning students bears any fruit. Sometimes Stiles answers with a stream of babble only tangentially connected to the topic at hand; sometimes he stares blankly at the wall in silence.

There are options, of course — Veritaserum or Legilimency, followed by a carefully spun _Obliviate_ to erase any memory of what could be seen as a breach of trust — but he’s reluctant to use magic here, and that magic, especially. Bad enough when used against a full-grown wizard; unthinkable with an eight year-old boy. There’s no telling what the long-term side effects might be.

He lets it go; starts teaching him the basics of magical theory and algebra instead. Stiles is smart but easily distracted, and sometimes it’s easier to just leave him alone in his private library, letting him flip through book after book.

He’s surprised at the boy’s complacency. Whoever “had him last,” in Isabella’s words, must have hurt him badly, and yet Stiles — despite his actions at the Home — isn’t an angry child, or a fearful one. He wonders every so often if it’s all an act, but — to what purpose? Stiles appears to have no agenda beyond getting chocolate stains all over the furniture.

He arranges to have one of the gardeners’ nieces, a nineteen-year old Squib named Amy, look after Stiles while he runs errands. He supposes she’ll do well enough to look after him once the fall term starts, since Muggle public school is out of the question under the circumstances. Stiles’ magic seems to pour out of his skin and into the air around him, overflowing. Things — happen, around him; shadows taking on shapes and colors and movement, and for all that it’s mesmerizing to watch it’s also vaguely unsettling.

Today, there are five frogs sitting on the dining room windowsill. They’re wearing top hats and every once in a while will jump up and rearrange themselves in a synchronized leap.

It would be odd even if Stiles were actively directing them, but — he’s not. He’s slumped over in an armchair, reading about the Goblin Wars of 1834 and chewing on a pretzel stick, spilling crumbs onto the rug.

***

He asks Professor Morrell about it during their weekly lunch meeting.

“It’s probably just excess magic manifesting itself,” she says. “You should consider yourself lucky he’s not blowing holes in your ceiling.”

“I think I might prefer the holes,” he says. “For it to manifest in such a structured way, and at his age...I’m almost afraid of what’s going to happen when he gets his hands on a wand.”

“I’d like to meet him,” Morrell says, eyebrows lifting in mock amazement. “Anyone who manages to scare the Shadow of the — ”

“Oh, not this again.” He sends a raspberry flying at her face with a flick of his fork. “You really don’t need to remind me that the words _top secret_ and _classified_ apparently mean nothing to you.”

The raspberry stops an inch away from her nose, then drops neatly onto her tart. “I always found it odd they’d never put us under Fidelius,” she says. “I think they’re actually hoping someone lets something slip. All that madness over in England, and no one here even knows — ”

“It was over forty years ago,” he says. “And there’s a reason for the silence. You can’t repeat a story that was never told in the first place.”

A skinny hand reaches over his shoulder, makes off with a bit of crust. He hears Morrell’s fork clatter to the ground, but his attention is focused on the incursion into his plate.

“You sound like a fortune cookie sometimes, you know that?” Stiles is saying, crunching loudly and bumping against the table with his hip. There’s a silver lizard napping in his hair. “You should grow out your beard; then you’d have something to stroke while spouting your wisdom.”

“You’re being rude,” he says mildly, and gives Stiles a gentle push towards Morrell. “Say hello to Professor Morrell, and then go back to the library and finish your worksheet.”

“Howdy,” Stiles says. “What do you teach?”

“Divination,” Morrell says, smiling in her inscrutable way. “And Latin. It’s nice to finally meet you.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says. His eyes drop to her hands, face flushing pink. “Uh, sorry. For the interruption and stuff.” He grabs a raspberry off Deaton’s plate, then swivels around to head back to the library.

“That was actually fairly subdued for him,” he tells Morrell once Stiles is out of sight.

“Nonetheless, he’s a bit — loud,” she says, eyes gazing at the spot where Stiles had been standing. Her hands lie loosely curled on the table, but there’s something forced about their softness.

“He’s just a boy,” he says, oddly defensive. “They tend not to be the quietest of creatures.”

Morrell looks up at him. “Boys will be boys,” she says, almost singsong, and it’s an opening; an invitation for him to finish her thought.

He stays quiet; watches her watch him.

Finally she sighs, pushes herself away from the table. “He has a point about the beard,” she says, and just like that she’s Professor Morrell again.

“Sometimes I wonder why I keep you around,” he muses, and she pauses with her back against the door, smiles sharply in answer.

He lets her leave, suddenly weary. The Muggles have a saying about foxholes and bedfellows, he thinks. There’s a whole constellation of scars linking their bodies, years spent in darkness wearing strangers’ skins. When it was all over — when it all turned to dust under their hands and they’d been asked to choose their rewards — his only request had been for a school.

He hadn’t asked her to stay; still isn’t sure what it was that she’d wanted.

His thoughts are interrupted by a loud thump from the library. “It’s like living with a tiny drunk troll,” he mutters to himself.

It’s probably for the best that Morrell isn’t there to see the fondness that’s no doubt on his face.

***

Three days before Stiles’ ninth birthday (or what Stiles claims is his birthday, anyway; he supposes it’s possible the boy just wants cake earlier in the month), the first of the students arrive.

As always, he’s there to welcome them at the gates, reassuring the parents of the First Years that in the whole of its 38-year history, no one at the Academy has ever been eaten by bears. Or wolves, though that’s become a more awkward conversation in recent years.

Stiles is supposed to be inside the apartment with Amy, but he’s not surprised to discover that the boy convinced her to take him for a walk just outside the Academy’s entrance.

No one seems to mind that there’s a skinny, floppy-haired child staring at them, or that there’s a bright blue parrot sitting on his shoulder, so he leaves them be. At least this one doesn’t have an eye-patch and a wooden leg like the last one.

***

That night, Stiles comes into the study and sits cross-legged on the floor.

He’s putting the finishing touches on a speech for tomorrow’s dinner ceremony, but it can wait.

“Can’t sleep?” he asks.

He thinks that the boy must have nightmares, but he’s never heard — or, for that matter, seen — any signs of them, so maybe not.

“The kid with the big family,” Stiles says. “The ones who kept hugging.”

“Derek Hale,” he answers, even though Stiles hasn’t asked.

“Derek Hale,” Stiles repeats. “Why’s it...different, for him?”

Sometimes words don’t work quite the way they should with Stiles, and he has to guess at their meaning.

“Derek comes from an affectionate family,” he says, and decides there’s no harm in Stiles knowing the rest — after all, everyone else at the Academy does.

“He’s a born-wolf,” he explains. “It’s very difficult for him to leave his family — his pack — and come here for nine months every year. It’s difficult for them, too. That’s why they all come out to say goodbye. And why there’s a lot of hugging, as you noted.”

“How come he’s the only one at the school?” Stiles asks.

“And not his siblings, you mean? It’s very rare for a born-wolf to have magical abilities. There aren’t that many born-wolves to begin with, and maybe one every five generations or so has the capacity to be a witch or wizard as well.”

He glances at the clock on the mantelpiece. “I think it’s time we both got to bed,” he says. “You can learn more about born-wolves tomorrow; there are a few books in my library that mention them.”

Stiles nods and rises, looking preoccupied.

Somehow, he isn’t surprised to find Stiles asleep in one of the library chairs the next morning, books spread across his lap.

***

“I think I should go to school now,” Stiles tells him during winter break. “You can get me a wand for Christmas.”

“You’re nine years old,” he says, flicking open the evening paper to scan the headlines. “You’re too young to have a wand.”

“I could’ve lied,” says Stiles. “I could be twelve for all you know.”

“Hmm,” he says. “In that case, I suppose that means I’ll have to give you some Veritaserum, just to make sure you’re telling the truth now.”

“Fine,” Stiles mutters. “I’ll just buy a wand myself.”

“First off,” he says, putting down the paper to meet the boy’s stubborn glare, “Unless you’ve been picking pockets, you don’t have any money. Secondly, you don’t even know where the wand shop is. And thirdly, it’s against wizarding law to sell a wand to anyone under the age of eleven, and they have spells that’ll mark you as too young the second you step inside.”

He expects another round of arguing, but Stiles just goes quiet for a minute, staring at the potatoes on his plate.

“Where do the wands in the wand shop come from?” Stiles asks, curious now rather than sullen.

“The wandmaker makes them, as you might have guessed from the name.”

“Oh,” says Stiles. “Yeah, I should’ve figured that one out on my own.”

***

Spring begins with a House Elf strike, then a week of terse negotiations with the Aurors after several students are discovered running a bliss-potion operation out of their rooms. His history with the Department only gets him so far, and he barely manages to keep everyone out of jail when there’s a crisis with the mermaids in the nearby lake, followed by weeks of dealing with angry parents who disagree with his stance that any student stupid enough to go kayaking in mermaid territory in the future frankly deserves to be gored by spears.

Sometime during all this, Amy moves to New York to go to art school, and while he knows full well that he should find another sitter for Stiles, it gets pushed to the back of his mind while he’s dealing with everything else.

And the boy seems to do well enough on his own — no damage to any property or to himself, no complaints from anyone else — and it becomes less and less of a priority until suddenly it’s the summertime, and Stiles announces that he needs a uniform for next year.

“Check your math,” he says. “You’ll be a few days short of ten, then.”

“You said I needed a wand to go to school,” Stiles says.

“That’s because you do, Stiles.” He really doesn’t want to have this fight again.

“Okay,” says Stiles, grinning and bouncing on the balls of his feet.

“Okay?”

“Yeah,” says Stiles, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a wand, of all things.

“Where did you get that?” he asks, heart sinking. Wizarding law doesn’t look kindly on wand-thieves, even those as young as Stiles.

“I made it!” says Stiles. With a flick of his wrist, the side table suddenly jolts forward, then tilts and falls with a crash. “I’m, uh, still getting the hang of it.”

He’s actually incapable of speech right now.

“Amy did the wood part,” Stiles says, a few seconds after they stare silently at the table. “I just brought her a birch branch and said I wanted something to play with. I even got her to hollow it out and make a seal so it could close it up, you know, after I put the core stuff in.”

“Core...stuff?”

“Yeah, the magic juice. The book said you need something like unicorn hair or dragon heartstring — which sounds disgusting, by the way — but I had to improvise since there aren’t any unicorns or dragons around here, which is a kind of a major failing of the Academy, like, we should totally have a few dragons out in the forest, how cool would that be — ”

“Stiles,” he says, getting his bearings back. “What do you mean, you improvised?”

“I mean I winged it, cobbled something together, contrived a solution — ”

“Stiles,” he interrupts, and Merlin, he needs to put a limit on how much the boy reads every day, if only for his own sanity. “You’re not going to tell me what’s inside that wand, are you?”

“Nope,” says Stiles.

“All right,” he sighs. “Can I at least try it out?”

“You’re not gonna break it open or anything, are you?”

“No,” he says, “But only because I know you’ll just do something even more ridiculous as a response.”

The wand is simple-looking, thicker than most but still elegant. A little short of eleven inches. He gives it a flick and nothing happens. “ _Accio_ pen!”

The pen stays exactly where it is. It doesn’t even wiggle.

Stiles grabs the wand back. “ _Accio_ pen!” The pen comes flying towards him, along with every other pen in the apartment. He can hear several thunking dully against the study door.

“Guess it only works for me,” Stiles says, batting away the pens with his left hand, his right still clutching his wand. 

“Guess so,” he says.

“So, about the uniform — ”

“I’ll schedule a fitting,” he says. “And a haircut,” because the fewer flammable parts the boy has come autumn, the better.

***

“I hear your ward’s gotten his hands on a wand,” Morrell says the next time they meet. He wonders if that’s new, her refusal to call Stiles by his name, or if he simply hasn’t noticed until now.

“He’s certainly creative,” he says. “And on the bright side, his magic’s gotten much more controlled — no more dancing animals all over my living room.”

Morrell slants a quick look at him before returning her gaze to her teacup. “He reminds me of someone I once met.”

He doesn’t rise to the bait. “He’s just a boy,” he says, “and one of your students come September.”

“I suppose I’ll have to take some responsibility for him at that point.”

“It takes a village,” he says. “Or so I’ve heard.”

Morrell smiles down at her cup. He doesn’t ask her what the leaves say.

***

Stiles turns out to be a capable but unremarkable student for the most part — surprising, given his earlier precociousness, but perhaps that was just the result of boredom and solitude, and unfettered access to what in retrospect were some rather inappropriate books for someone his age.

His two friends are a boy named Scott who’s a natural on a broom but a disaster most everywhere else, and a girl named Erica who knows far too many spells that end in tears and pus-filled boils. Everyone else, Stiles more or less ignores.

At any rate, Morrell was right — the boy is now the responsibility of the Academy as a whole, and while he still keeps an eye on him and keeps him company during breaks, he’s no longer as concerned with his future.

He can’t be, not when the Academy is full of hormone-riddled teenagers sneaking each other faulty love potions and experimenting with sex spells and every so often kayaking in the mermaids’ lake because they’re all idiots, all of them.

“How’s his Latin?” he asks Morrell when he sees her, which isn’t nearly as often these days. 

“Inventive,” she says; or: “A bit loud, still”; or, once: “Stark and bloodied.”

_He’s a bit young for Seneca_ , he almost says in response to that last one, then remembers how he found Stiles, back at the Home with his tongue missing.

“He practices all time in his room during breaks,” he tells her instead.

“Very dedicated,” she agrees, “But only to the things that hold his interest.”

***

In February of Stiles’ third year, the new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor Apparates to northern California and burns down Derek Hale’s house.

Derek’s uncle, away on business, is the only survivor apart from Derek himself. Everyone else is burned alive, the Fiendfyre reducing everything in a half-mile radius to ash.

Before the week is out, Peter Hale tracks down Kate Argent and tears out her throat. His mate was killed in the fire. By wizarding law, he is within his rights to act as he did.

By human law, he is taken into custody by a SWAT team and placed under 24-hour surveillance.

By wolf law, he rips his own heart out before morning.

All told, it takes him, Morrell and a team of Aurors seven hours, countless memory spells and two dozen cleaning charms to make the whole thing disappear, until all that’s left is Derek.

***

“Harris tells me that he’s missing some rare herbs from his storage room,” Morrell says, appearing beside him and matching his strides down the hallway. 

“And he told you instead of me because...?”

“I believe he’s still reeling from your response the last time he acknowledged a break-in.”

“They’re teenagers, not mastermind criminals. If they’re getting past his protective wards, it doesn’t really leave me with a lot of confidence in his overall abilities.”

“It’s interesting,” Morrell says. “They didn’t take anything that would be useful for a lust potion or memory aid. Some of them you’d need for an Animagus spell, but you’d be missing a few critical components that need to be picked fresh from the forest. Several of the herbs are quite poisonous, though.”

“Why go though the trouble of mixing a poison when you could just throw a hex?” he asks.

Morrell hums in answer.

“Well, I’m sure the culprits will make themselves known soon enough,” he says. “We’ll just have to be on the lookout for someone with a horse’s head surrounded by internally bleeding classmates.”

“Speaking of horses’ heads,” Morrell says, “Your charge seems to have developed a certain fascination with Derek Hale.”

“Stiles has always been intrigued by Derek. He grew up with Muggles; they’ve got a thing for werewolves.”

Morrell stops suddenly, forcing him to turn around and step back towards her.

“There’s something odd about that boy,” she says.

“Stiles or Derek?”

“Derek’s far too straightforward to be odd.”

She’s being unnaturally straightforward herself at the moment, but all that means is that she’s playing a different game now, and he refuses to be drawn in.

“I’ve got parchments to sign,” he tells her, and walks the rest of the distance to his office alone, wishing she hadn’t mentioned Derek. What happened to the Hales last winter wasn’t his fault — the school board picked Argent, not him; she’d been an Auror for three years and none of her superiors had ever suspected an affiliation to a fringe purity group. There was no way he could’ve known what she’d been planning.

Not his fault at all, really; but he doesn’t like to dwell on it.

***

He notices Stiles watching Derek, after that. When Harris tells him that family tragedy or not, Derek’s on track to fail Seventh Year Potions, he suggests enlisting Stiles as a tutor, even though he’s only a Fifth Year. Chemistry and Potions are Stiles’ best subjects, in spite of his tendency to ignore instructions and come up with his own highly volatile concoctions.

He thinks Stiles can handle the work easily enough. This is the boy who made his own wand, after all, and refused to trade it in for a...more traditional one on his eleventh birthday. 

Harris agrees, possibly seeing it as an efficient way to torture both boys.

The tutoring goes well.

“A little too well,” Harris mutters darkly. He’s ignored by the rest of the teaching staff, most of whom think Stiles’ and Derek’s new friendship is rather sweet.

He sees them sometimes, occasionally with Scott and Erica and Derek’s friend Boyd, but more often by themselves. Stiles chattering away; Derek watching him talk, eyes shadowed. Derek seems to at least tolerate Stiles, which is more than can be said for most of his own classmates.

It’s not his fault, he tells himself. The board appointed Kate; he simply hadn’t vetoed their decision.

Still, he asks that Derek join him and Stiles during the summer break, and holds back his surprise when Derek says that he’s already agreed to stay with Morrell, to work on his Divination.

“Ah,” he says. “You’re interested in becoming a Seer?”

Derek shrugs.

He supposes it makes sense, given what happened. “Hopefully Professor Morrell has already tempered any expectations that you’ll be able to see your own future, or any future at all, for that matter?”

Derek nods, eyes glued to the floor.    

“All right then,” he says. “You should still stop by for dinner sometimes, if only to keep Stiles from raising an army of giant wasps out of boredom. Again.”

Derek looks up at that, mouth shaping into something that’s almost a smile.

“He said he thought they were bees,” Derek says. “I think he wanted to see how they made honey.”

Derek doesn’t agree to come to dinner, but he shows up every Friday that summer nonetheless.

***

Stiles finally hits his growth spurt in his Sixth Year, and spends most mornings of the summer after stretched over the length of the sofa, sometimes with food balanced precariously on his chest.

“We do have a table, you know,” he says, plucking the bowl of cereal off him.

Stiles sticks out his tongue, flailing a bit in the process, and that’s when he sees the mark on his neck. It’s also when Derek wanders out of Stiles’ bedroom, scratching absently at his stomach on the way to the kitchen.

He leaves it alone until after dinner, when Derek goes for a run. 

“You do realize he’s three years older than you,” he says. Stiles looks up from the dishes, sponges plopping dully into the water as his spell fizzles out.

“Seriously? You’re giving me the dad talk?” and there’s a thread of anger in Stiles’ voice — or maybe fear. It’s strange, coming from Stiles, who usually vacillates between cheerful and indignant.

“You’re not kicking him out,” Stiles tells him, because after the summer with Morrell, Derek has chosen to stay with them over breaks. Or, he realizes now, with Stiles, specifically.  

“No,” he agrees. “But I am going to ask him to sleep on the couch from now on.”

“We’re not — it’s none of your business, but we’re not even having sex. So there’s no need to exile him out here.”

“Sorry,” he says. “My roof, my rules.”

“Fine,” says Stiles. He throws down the plate he was drying and slams the door to his room.

The next morning he finds Derek lying on the couch, Stiles sprawled on top of him, snoring lightly.

Derek glances towards him and his mouth sets into a thin line, but his hand doesn’t move from its spot on Stiles’ hip.

Trust Stiles to find a way to wriggle through a technicality.

***

He leaves it alone, after that. Stiles has never needed his protection, and Derek does seem to be doing better — more in control of his wolf — with Stiles draping himself all over him at every opportunity.

Morrell brings it up once, strangely hesitant, asking if perhaps they shouldn’t be concerned about Derek’s level of attachment.

“What do you mean?” he asks, distracted. Several Seventh Years (though not Stiles, thankfully) are in the hospital wing suffering from severe stomach ulcers, and the head nurse can’t figure out why or how to fix it.

“Just — Derek’s strength,” Morrell says. “And Stiles — ”

“Derek could never hurt Stiles,” he says. He knows enough about born-wolves to be certain of that, at least.

“No,” Morrell agrees. “That’s what concerns me.”   

She looks tired, he notices, faint circles under her eyes and a certain brittleness to her words. But they’re all tired now, trying to figure this thing out, keep it from spreading further.

He wants to ask what she means, but they’re interrupted by the Charms professor running into his office — another student’s collapsed, and they rush out to help get him to the infirmary with the others.

***

A type of rare fungus, he figures out in the end; one that eats through stomach lining and multiplies with the application of further magic. They’d had to resort to Muggle medicines to kill it, and no one knows how it got inside Matt Daehler’s home-brewed Firewhiskey (how the Firewhiskey got inside the students is a far easier mystery to solve), but no one dies and only about two-thirds of the parents send Howlers.

All in all, he’s looking forward to a nice subdued winter break, except Stiles and Derek are apparently in the midst of an argument, which means that Derek decides to stay with Morrell and Stiles decides that the dining room works much better with a swamp as a carpet.

“Perhaps you could try talking to him?” he asks after several days go by. He’d promised himself not to interfere, but he misses being able to spread his paper out over breakfast without having to shoo frogs away from his eggs.

“He’s mad at me,” Stiles says. He looks more resigned than heartbroken, so it can’t be anything too serious.

“So apologize.”

“Can’t,” Stiles says. “I’m not really sorry, and he’s got that whole thing where he can tell if I’m lying.”

“So apologize for upsetting him. You are sorry about that, aren’t you?”

Stiles shrugs, running one hand over his head. He’s grown his hair out, and it tends to clump up like a rodent’s nest when he’s stressed.

“Yeah, I guess,” he mumbles. “Shit, I think I really am sorry about that.”

“Language,” he scolds gently. Stiles grins at him, levering himself up off the sofa and towards the front door. “And no visiting anyone until you’ve returned the dining room back to its uninhabited state.”

Stiles rolls his eyes at that, but takes a second to point his wand at the muck slowly encroaching into the hallway, moving his arm in a quick, complicated spiral.

“All gone,” Stiles says, and amazingly it is in fact all gone. “Don’t wait up!” he yells over his shoulder.

“Try not to get mauled,” he calls back, then winces when he realizes how that could be interpreted.

“There’s a reason I never wanted any children of my own,” he tells his empty apartment.

 ***

Stiles and Derek make up, he assumes, because Derek comes over for dinner that night with his things.

Morrell Floos him, once, a few months later. It’s the morning after the April moon and Derek’s not back from his hunt and a quick look proves that Stiles is missing as well, and she almost manages to work him into a panic until he remembers himself; throws out a simple tracking spell, then a more powerful one of his own design when the first fails.

The spell flickers out after a second, but it works long enough to lead him to the woods, where he and Morrell find the two of them curled up inside a hollow oak, under one of Stiles’ winter cloaks.

“Young love,” he tells Morrell, relieved and rueful for worrying.

“It didn’t work,” she says softly. “The tracking spell didn’t work, and they — ”

He doesn’t respond. Magic can be tricky with born-wolves; she knows that. As for Stiles — well, magic can be tricky with him, too, sometimes.

“Coffee,” he says instead. “I’d like to be well-caffeinated when I lecture Stiles for almost getting eaten and freezing to death.”

He rests his hand against the small of Morrell’s back, nudges her back towards the school.

“If you’re not inside in the next fifteen minutes I’ll get Harris to fetch you,” he says, confident that Derek, if not Stiles, has been awake from the moment he and Morrell entered the forest.

***

Stiles doesn’t suffer any ill-effects from his moonlit jaunt, but Morrell develops a cough, then a fever, and he’s forced to take over her classes for a week while she recovers under quarantine from what turns out to be a bout of Scrofungulus.

He visits her after the danger of contagion passes, and tugs Stiles in after him when he finds the boy skulking outside the infirmary.

Morrell’s staring up at the ceiling, propped up against pillows and eyes slightly glazed. He pulls over a chair to sit near her bed. Stiles perches on an empty bed across the aisle, getting a book out of his bag as though he merely wanted to come in here to study.

“I think he feels a bit guilty,” he whispers, but Morrell doesn’t seem to hear him. “Been a while since we’ve had to do the whole bedside thing,” he says, louder, and she turns towards him at that.

“A while, yes,” she says, voice dry and raspy. “Yet here we are again. You said — I know you believe that, about our silence, the stories. But it’s not right, is it?” and her eyes slip shut. “Because it’s all — there’s only so many out there. So of course they’re going to — what else, what else can they do?”

“She’s still a bit feverish, the poor dear,” the nurse says, jostling him out of the way to whisper a calming spell over Morrell’s head.

“Do you know, I actually like being a teacher?” Morrell says dreamily.

“That’s good,” he says, watching her face go slack in sleep. “Considering you’re one of the few I can actually tolerate.”

He glances towards Stiles, but the boy hasn’t taken his eyes off his book, hand stretched across the pages like a twitchy spider.

And he knows, knows that there’s something there, something Morrell wants him to see — but he likes being a teacher, too. This is the only skin that’s ever felt even halfway like it should. 

***

In the springtime he asks Stiles what courses he’d like to take in his eighth year.

“Not sure I’ll stick around for the full degree,” Stiles says, surprising him.

“What are you planning to do instead?” he asks.

“Dunno,” Stiles says. “Maybe I’ll put on a top hat and cape, take my show on the road. Derek can be my lovely assistant.”

“The Aurors generally frown on using real magic in front of Muggles.”

“You wound me, good sir,” Stiles says with mock affront. “There won’t be a trace of wizardry at my shows.”

“Just sleights of hand, then?”

“Well, sleights of something, anyway.”

“Is this because Derek’s graduating next month?” he asks, suddenly realizing he doesn’t know what Derek has planned, either. It slips his mind, sometimes, that Derek no longer has a place in the world outside of school.

“Nah, Derek would wait if I asked,” Stiles says. “I just — I don’t know; seems like the time’s right to strike off on my own. On my own with Derek, anyway.”

 “You’ll always be welcome here, you know,” he says, because maybe Stiles doesn’t.

“Thanks,” Stiles grins. “You won’t miss me too much, will you?” he asks, fluttering his eyelashes.

“I’ve actually been thinking of adopting a dragon,” he says. “That way I can continue constantly fearing for my living space and spending my wages on snack food. Though I’m told they’re much less moody than your average teenager, so that’ll be a nice change.”

“Yeah, yeah, you love me, really,” Stiles says, and he — he thinks about that small silent boy, compares him to the wizard standing in front of him and says, smiling: “Hmm. Maybe. Just a little.”

***

Stiles and Derek disappear in late June, the afternoon that Derek gets his degree. He’s not too surprised by the lack of goodbye; none of them are the type for emotional scenes. Stiles is just a few months shy of seventeen, and he figures that’s close enough not to go through the trouble of tracking the boy down. Especially since Stiles is staying in touch, in his own unique way.

Morrell never mentions either of their names, but sometimes she pauses in his office and runs her fingers across the postcards tacked to the wall, whispers something too low for him to hear.

Stiles sends the first one, featuring a snow-capped mountain with hints of a small town near its base, the same day he and Derek vanish from the grounds. It’s old; faded and creased, as though folded and re-opened dozens of times over the years. The ones that follow are brand-new, showing different towns and landmarks across the U.S.

They’re all blank on the back except for his name, scrawled in Stiles’ messy hand. Not “Deaton” but his full name, his original one. It’s a good thing he knows Stiles as well as he does, understands Stiles’ insatiable curiosity and need to show off what he’s learned. From anyone else, that sort of thing could come off as a warning, maybe even a threat.   

As it is, he just rolls his eyes and pins them up on his wall after erasing the ink, and sometimes when he’s having a bad day and students are being their usual moronic selves, he likes to look up at the postcards and think, _Well, at least I did one thing right._

***

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Wolf.**

She asks him to stay behind after class one day, fingers curled around her wand as the other students file out.

He stays.

“Derek,” she says. She leans forward from where she’s perched against the desk, brown hair falling across her shoulders in waves. 

“Professor Argent,” he says, voice steady. 

“Call me Kate,” she tells him, and she rests one hand lightly on his shoulder.

She smells like ginger. It overpowers his nose, makes him thrum with uncertainty, but.

He stays.

( _Sweetheart, you are just more than I can resist_.)

***

He stumbles into the common room ten minutes before curfew.

“What did Argent want this time?” Boyd asks.

Derek’s body feels post-moon new, all his bones trying to slot into place.

“She thinks I have a shot at being an Auror,” he says, and his voice is rougher than it should be. “Wanted to see if I’d be interested in some extra practice sessions.”

Boyd gives him a long, slow look from where he’s stretched out on the sofa.

“A little early for that sort of thing, don’t you think?” he says mildly, and Derek flushes but doesn’t respond.

Boyd never brings it up again. There’s a reason he and Derek are friends.

( _Baby, sometimes I can’t even look at you, I want it so much_.)

***

He tells her about his family. Their estate in Beacon Hills. He knows he did; knows he invited her for a covert visit over Christmas break. He wasn’t used to asking things from her; had to picture it in his mind to work up the courage:

 _This is the tree I splintered when Laura snuck up behind me_ , he’d say. _This is the shed I built last summer — no magic, just tools. This is the school I went to — before. This is where I played baseball with my cousins, until Mom made me stop._

It’s harder than it should be, trying to see her surrounded by the things that belong to his pack, but Derek ignores it. Knows she’s liquid and heat while home is cold granite and chains, but thinks maybe together they’ll make a place where he fits.

He’s wrong, obviously, but.

She tells him no. Pays his family a visit the next month instead, while Derek’s asleep in his bed thousands of miles from his pack.

It should hurt more than it does. Maybe Derek’s too broken already for this to break him up even more. Or maybe some pain is simply too large to feel.

Whatever the reason, Derek doesn’t fall apart or go off on a rage-fueled rampage the way most of his classmates expect. He wakes up, goes to class, does his work, goes to bed. Sometimes he even manages to eat.

Derek turns sixteen on a wet Thursday in March and it’s his fault everything’s been destroyed, but that’s okay. He’s a monster, just like she said. That means it’s okay to be monstrous.

( _You’re a beast, babe, and you know it_.)

***

He tells Deaton he’s spending the summer with Boyd; tells Boyd he’s going back to Beacon Hills to tie up loose ends.

Boyd doesn’t know that there are no loose ends, that none of the townspeople even remember the Hales. It doesn’t matter. The woods are still there, still the same in places the fire didn’t reach.

He spends three months on four paws, thinks about not going back, but he misses the school. It’s the only thing he misses that still exists in the world.

Plus Boyd will probably track him down and drag him back to Maine if he’s not in class the first day.

***

“That kid’s staring at you again,” Boyd says.

Derek looks up from his biology notebook. “What?”

Boyd nods at a table in the corner of the library, where a blonde girl is whispering furiously at a boy who is — staring at Derek.

Derek lifts his lip in a snarl, showing teeth, and the kid grins.

Boyd huffs out a laugh. “That’s Deaton’s ward. Stiles. He’s been creeping on you since day one, but it’s staring to get obvious.”

Derek isn’t sure what to do with that information. “You think he’s a threat?” he asks.

Boyd raises his eyebrows. “I think he’s got a crush, Wolfman. Though I find it interesting that that’s the first thing you think of when faced with a spindly little Fourth Year.”

“How do you know what year he’s in?” Derek asks, still trying to process the rest.

“Everyone knows about Stiles,” Boyd says, shrugging, but he looks uncomfortable.

“He doesn’t have a crush,” Derek finally mutters, returning to his book. “Not unless he’s a complete idiot.”

“Like I said, everyone knows about Stiles."

***

Derek wakes up in the infirmary after the next full moon. The wolf had savaged its own flesh, like one of the bitten.

“If you feel like you’re losing control, you need to tell me,” Deaton says. He’s standing awkwardly at the foot of his bed, smelling even more like burnt apples than usual.

“It’s fine,” Derek rasps. “It won’t happen again.”

He can always chain himself to a tree in the woods, if it does.

“All right,” Deaton says. “I’ll take your word on that.”

It’s only after Deaton leaves that Derek notices the kid sitting in a chair on his right, knees pulled up to his chest. He smells him before he sees him, a too-thick wave of cinnamon, cherry and earth.

“Uh, hey,” he says, giving Derek a little wave. “I’m Stiles. I brought you some blueberry muffins from breakfast; they’re your favorite, right?”

Derek just stares at him.

“Wow, that, uh, probably made me sound like a stalker, but I just — notice things about people, you know? Like your friend Boyd, he’s all about the eggs and hash browns, but you have kind of a sweet tooth, tend to go for the waffles and stuff.”

Derek closes his eyes and turns away. Whatever the kid is offering, he doesn’t want it.

“Right,” says Stiles. “Good talk. I’ll just, uh, leave these here, okay?”

He hears him get up and walk to the door, banging into a cart along the way.

“You want me to close the shades so it’s not as bright in here?” Stiles calls out.

Derek ignores him, slowing his breathing and letting his skin stitch itself back together.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Stiles mutters, and then whispers a spell. The room turns dark and it smells like — it smells like —

Derek’s body jolts up despite the pain, eyes wide and nostrils flaring, but Stiles is already gone. He picks up a muffin and sniffs, and under the blueberries it smells just earthy, and a little like cherries and cinnamon. Not the kid then, just his spell. Derek isn’t sure what that means, or if it matters.

Every other witch and wizard he’s ever met has had the same scent as their magic, more or less, but Stiles — Stiles smells like pie left out in the forest.

His magic smells like the forest’s full of wolves.

***

He keeps an eye out for Stiles, after that. Sees him with the blonde girl and sometimes with the boy who made the varsity Quidditch team as a First Year. Sometimes, when Stiles notices Derek looking, he’ll smile and give him an awkward wave. But he keeps his wand hidden.

***

He spends his summer break with Boyd and Boyd’s grandmother in her cottage in Vermont. For the most part, he stays a wolf, but he shifts back for meals and chores.

He’s an alpha and an omega, a wizard and a wolf. It’s easier not to think about it, so he doesn’t. Whatever he is, he is.  

Boyd runs with him on foot, sometimes, and his grandmother bakes blueberry scones and doesn’t ask any questions. It’s better than what Derek deserves, but he takes it anyway.

( _Sweetheart, me and you, we’re gonna set the world on fire_.)

***

The first full moon of the term comes and Derek is restless, chasing after something just out of reach. There’s something in the forest with him, something that smells like earth and cinnamon and _wolf_ , but Derek can trace it only as far as the trees, where it melts into the shadows. It’s something small, then, and fast; and it keeps him distracted from the empty space where _pack_ used to be, however muted and faint. 

The next morning, Derek wakes up in his own bed, free of injury. He wants to track down Stiles and throw him against the wall and demand answers, or maybe just sniff his wand, but Stiles is Deaton’s ward and Derek needs to prove he still has control.

It doesn’t matter, he tells himself. If it’s a threat, then it’s only a threat to him and he’ll either deal with it or he won’t.

And if it’s something else — then it matters even less, really.

It’s not worth jeopardizing his place here. This is the only home he has left, for all that parts of it still stink of ginger.

***

Two months into Derek’s seventh year, Professor Harris tells him he’s very close to failing Potions, which isn’t a surprise. He also tells him to report to the lab three times a week after dinner for tutoring sessions with Stiles, which is.

“Why not someone in my year?” he asks.

“The headmaster suggested Stiles,” Harris says, sounding a little gleeful about it.

“Fine.” If nothing else, maybe he can finally figure out what’s going on with the kid’s smell.

***

The first thing Stiles says to him is, “Man, Harris really has it in for you, huh?”

His robes are askew and there’s a gravy stain on one of shirtsleeves.

“I mean, he hates me, like, a ton, so if he’s punishing you with my presence then you must really be on his shit list,” Stiles continues, dropping his books on the table with a thunk and straddling the bench. “Lucky for you, I’m actually something of a Potions prodigy, so we should have you sorted out in no time.”

He doesn’t seem to expect Derek to respond, so Derek doesn’t.

“Right, so I think you guys are doing Veritaserum this month, which does not sound like the greatest idea given the amount of gossip and backstabbing that goes on around here.” Stiles flips through one of the books, pausing when he gets to the page with the recipe on it.

“Okay,” he says. “Go for it.”

Derek gives him a look.

“Hey, I can’t fix the problem until I know what it is. So you go and start chopping, and I’ll let you know when I see something that needs fixing.”

Derek represses a sigh and gets up to gather the ingredients from the cabinet. He has the recipe memorized, it just — doesn’t work for him. Same with all the other potions they’ve learned this year.

He’s halfway through the prep work, shredding the dandelion root as instructed, when Stiles places his hand on top of Derek’s. Derek raises an eyebrow and Stiles snatches his hand back.

“Uh, I think I know what the problem is,” Stiles says. “You’re a born-wolf.”

Derek hopes his face is communicating just how unimpressed he is.

“And that means your magic works differently!” Stiles adds quickly.

“Differently, how?” Derek asks, and ignores the grin the kid sends his way at hearing him speak.

“Like, it’s bound up much more tightly in your, uh, body,” he says, blushing and tugging at his shirt collar, “And it doesn’t get transferred to the things you touch the way it does for the rest of us. So any potion where you have to prepare the ingredients by hand, you’re going to have some trouble.”

“How can you tell?” Derek asks, looking down at his hands. They’re normal, no claws in sight.

“I read it in one of Deaton’s books,” Stiles says. “And it makes sense. A lot of the Seventh Year potions require tearing things up manually, which explains why you’re having so much trouble.”

“Fine,” says Derek. “If you’re right, how do I fix it?”

Stiles thinks for a moment, mouth twisting. “I guess if we increase the amount of whatever ingredient it is, it might balance out the lack of magical transference.”

“Increase by how much?”

“Dude, I may be a Potions genius, but this is my first time at this rodeo. We might have to work it out by trial and error until we can figure out some sort of pattern.”

Stiles looks overly cheerful at the thought of having to spend several evenings a week for the foreseeable future trying to cobble together dangerous mixtures.

 “So you’ve downgraded yourself?” Derek asks, and decides adding a pinch more of dandelion root will do for a start.

“Huh?”

Stiles is chewing on the end of his pencil, scribbling some sort of calculation Derek can’t make out.

“Earlier you said you were a Potions prodigy, but now you’re just a genius.”

Derek’s not sure why he’s engaging him like this, but. It’s been a while since he’s spoken to anyone who wasn’t a professor or Boyd.

“Dude, were you actually paying attention to all that?” Stiles says, leaning forward in his excitement and nearly dipping his tie in Derek’s cauldron. He catches it at the last second and tosses it over his shoulder. “I’m gonna have to start watching my words if you keep that up,” he says, grinning, and Derek can’t help but breathe him in, this close to his skin.

***

They spend three weeks fiddling with ingredient amounts without much success. On Monday of the fourth week, Stiles arrives at the lab in a flurry of papers.

“I’ve figured it out!” he shouts.

“Great,” says Derek. “Does it involve soaking your chemistry notes in leech juice?”

“Whoops,” says Stiles, snatching them out of the way. “Sorry about that. Anyway, I think I have a solution to our problem.”

“My problem,” corrects Derek. “Your problems, we haven’t even started on.”

Stiles sticks out his tongue at that, and it reminds Derek yet again that Stiles is only a kid and probably has no idea what he’s doing, no matter how potent he smells.

“Anyway,” says Stiles, “The ingredients plan isn’t panning out, clearly, so I thought — why not use the amount in the textbook, but transfer your magic to the stuff you’re going to be touching the traditional way.”

Derek leans against the table, waiting.

“The traditional way being through your wand, obviously,” says Stiles.

“Obviously,” Derek repeats. “So you want me to, what, spell extremely sensitive ingredients before putting them into volatile potions? That doesn’t sound dangerous at all.”

“We’ve been spending too much time together,” Stiles says, eyes narrowing. “My sarcastic wit is starting to rub off on you.” He flushes, then, the way he does whenever he accidentally (and Derek hopes, for both their sakes, that it really is accidentally) saying something even vaguely suggestive.

“Are you going somewhere with this or not?” Derek asks

“Hey, buddy, I’m already there,” Stiles says. “Just waiting for a certain wolf to catch up.” He turns around to dig through his bag.

“Stiles,” Derek says, and Stiles pauses his rummaging, tilting his head back so he can look at Derek upside down.

“Yes, Derek?”

“Did you come up with a spell or not?”

“Course I did!” Stiles says, spinning around on the bench and banging both his knees in the process.  “ _Motherfuck —_ ”

“Stiles!”

“Yeah, yeah.” Stiles finally settles, elbows on the table. “Okay, so point your wand at the dandelion root, say _Potentia Translationis_ , and hold it steady.”

“For how long?”

“Uh, a few seconds, probably? I’ll tell you when to stop.” He’s chewing on his pencil again. It’s distracting.

Feeling a little silly, Derek does as instructed. He makes it to six mississippis in his head when Stile suddenly knocks the wand out of his hand.

“And you’re done!” says Stiles.

Derek growls at him and bends down to pick his wand off the floor. “You’re the one who’s done if you ever do that again,” he says, and Stiles nearly falls off the bench laughing.

Derek ignores him and looks at the dandelion root. It doesn’t appear to be any different.

“How do we tell if it worked?” he asks.

Stiles is still snickering like an idiot, but he makes a _get on with it_ motion with his hands. Oh.

Derek prepares the potion ingredients, carefully shredding the root. It takes about thirty minutes, and while he’s working Stiles goes quiet, then still. When Derek adds the root into the cauldron, the potion releases a puff of gray smoke, settling into a thick, colorless goo. Just like the book described.

“Prodigy,” says Stiles, and he sounds rueful. “It should work for the other potions, too; just say the spell and hold for six seconds.”

“Okay,” says Derek. They watch the cauldron for a minute. “Thanks,” he remembers to add.

“Yeah, sure,” says Stiles. He bites his lip and looks down on the floor. Derek should probably not be staring.

Stiles scratches at his head. “So hey, now that we’ve figured this out, I was thinking, maybe you could — return the favor, help me out with something?”

Derek’s fingers tighten on his wand. “What do you need help with?” he asks, and tries not to sound suspicious, but. He knows what sort of favors wizards ask of wolves.

“How are you on a broom?” Stiles asks, which is — not what Derek was expecting.

“Not great,” he says. He doesn’t like being separated from the ground.

“Right,” says Stiles. “What about — uh — ”

It hits him, suddenly, that Stiles is straining for an excuse. To continue spending time with Derek, and. Well, he does owe him for his help.

“I could use someone to study with on Thursdays,” he says. “Boyd has Dueling Club then.”

“Thursdays,” says Stiles, nodding a little too earnestly. “Okay. Sounds good. I’ll, uh, see you then?”

Derek nods, and Stiles raises his hand to — do something, Derek’s not sure — before quickly lowering it to grab his stuff and walk out of the room, head bowed.

Watching him go, Derek realizes he’s yet to smell Stiles’ spellwork since that morning in the infirmary.

***

They study on Thursdays.

Or, rather, Derek tries to study while Stiles runs long, bony fingers over pages and pages of text, as though learning by osmosis, sometimes chattering away about everything and nothing, sometimes staring intently at the bookshelves, mouth working but making no sound. It’s a little unsettling.

Right now, he’s talking. About Scott.

“ — so then, Ferguson asks him to transfigure the snail into a pair of glasses, and he’s about to say the spell but then I guess he sees the sun glinting off of Allison’s hair or something because next thing I know, the snail is the size of my head and also _on top of my head_ — ”

Derek tunes him out, reading up for his physics exam. Allison’s an Argent but she’s never spoken one word to him, always looks away when he walks by, and maybe she’s a threat but really, there’s not much he can be threatened with these days. 

 “ — but I told him it’d be fine because you’ll still be around then,” Stiles finishes, and looks at Derek expectantly.

“Still be around where?” Derek asks, because he honestly has no idea what Stiles is talking about now.

“At the Academy,” Stiles says. “And you will be, right? You’re going to get your full degree instead of busting out at the end of the year.”

 “Yeah,” Derek says. “Might as well.”

He wouldn’t know what to do with himself, anywhere else.

“Yeah, okay, that’s what I thought,” Stiles says, quickly launching into a different story involving Erica and a Mandrake.

***

That summer Deaton extends an invitation to stay with him and Stiles, but Derek decides to stay with Morrell instead. There’s another boy from his year trying to get ahead in Divination, a quiet kid from East named Isaac, and it feels like a legitimate pursuit. Not like whatever Derek would be getting up to with Stiles.

Professor Morrell is calm and easy-going, lets him spend a week in New York without a fuss. His sister Laura always wanted to move there, but their parents refused to let her go so far from the pack. Which led to no small amount of tension, especially with Derek attending school in Maine. He likes the city, likes how invisible it makes him feel, and thinks maybe he’ll settle there once he graduates.

When he comes back Morrell makes him look at dozens of star charts, takes him and Isaac to look up at the sky as it is.

It’s odd, being outside in the woods on two feet. The stars never seem to have anything to tell him.

“They tend to signify major shifts in energy. Wars and movements, things that change history,” Morrell says. “But sometimes if you look deeply enough, you’ll be able to see something of your own fate. Not in the stars themselves, but in the space they open up and illuminate inside of you.”

Derek thinks he has plenty of spaces inside of him, but none that the starlight can reach.

“I don’t think I’m very good at this,” he tells Isaac after she leaves them alone in the clearing.

Isaac grins. “I think we’re doing okay. The centaurs spend decades studying this stuff, and they still didn’t see World War I coming.”

He likes Isaac, likes the idea that he’s still capable of making friends even more. Stiles — Stiles doesn’t count.

“I’m having dinner at Deaton’s on Friday,” he says. “He won’t mind if you come with me.”

“Oh,” says Isaac. “Stiles, too, right? That’s okay, I think I’ll pass.”

“What’s wrong with Stiles?” he asks, and can’t suppress the growl in his voice.

“I didn’t mean — I know you guys are friends,” Isaac says. “And he’s a good friend. It’s just, the people who aren’t his friends — ”

He trails off. “Like, you must’ve heard about what he did to the Whittemore kid after he messed with Erica.”

Derek has no idea what Isaac is talking about, but he doesn’t push the issue. “He’s loyal,” he says, because he pays enough attention to Stiles’ stories to know that there’s not much he wouldn’t do for Erica. Or Scott.

“Sure,” Isaac says, smiling ruefully. “That’s one way of putting it. Either way, I’ve had enough excitement in my life without getting involved with that kid.”

***

He asks Stiles about it, not that week but the week after. They’re in his bedroom at Deaton’s, Stiles sprawled on his bed and Derek sitting cross-legged on the floor, thumbing through one of Stiles’ comic books.

“Oh my god,” Stiles says. “Do people still think that was me?”

“Was it?”

“Well, yeah, but there wasn’t a shred of evidence, so I don’t know why Morrell thinks she can go about disparaging my good name.”

“It wasn’t Morrell,” Derek says, confused. “It was Isaac. Why would Morrell — ”

“Who the hell is Isaac?” Stiles interrupts. “Hold on, how many nubile young men does she have stashed away in her quarters right now?”

“It’s just me and Isaac,” Derek says. “He’s in my year. He’s on East’s Quidditch team.”

“Oh, right,” says Stiles, eyes narrowing in concentration. “I think Scott’s friends with him. Pretty, right? Would you characterize him as pretty? I mean, I guess, objectively you’d have to, but — you never get the urge to make out with him under the stars, do you?”

“No, Stiles,” Derek says, rolling his eyes.

“Good,” says Stiles, “Because I’m pretty sure he has a thing for Scott.”

“Okay,” Derek says, “But you still haven’t told me about what’s-his-face, or why you think a professor would be gossiping about you to other students.”

For some strange reason, that makes Stiles beam. “You’re getting better at this.”

“At what?”

“Me,” he says, head hanging over the side of his bed like some demented monkey. “And for the record, if you ever do get the urge, I’d be a much better under-the-stars make out partner than Isaac.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Derek says drily. “Just in case you beat the odds and actually end up an attractive human being.”

“Fuck you, asshole!” Stiles says, laughing, and Derek looks at his wide open mouth, his bright brown eyes and the moles scattered across his skin like a constellation, and thinks —

No.

He doesn’t think anything at all.

He also doesn’t get an answer to his questions, but decides it doesn’t really matter. He finds he likes looking at the stars with Isaac sitting silently beside him in the field. They never provide any answers, either, but at least there’s no danger in staring at them for too long.

***

Sometimes after dinner, Stiles takes Derek out into the woods on “expeditions.”

Mostly these involve Stiles muttering to himself and ripping various plants from the ground to place in his backpack.

“Pretty sure we’re not supposed to go this far in,” Derek tells him during their first trip out. He can vaguely smell the hippogriff that’s rumored to live out here.

“Dude, why do you think I brought you along?” Stiles says. “You’re the muscle. And occasionally pack mule,” he adds, dumping a bag of mushrooms and possibly rocks into his arms.

Tonight, they’re trying to find a clump of foxglove, which the Academy gardeners tend to cut down on sight.

“What do you need all of this for, anyway?” Derek asks.

“Oh, you know, experiments and stuff,” Stiles answers, his scent going slightly sour the way it does when he’s trying not to lie.

Derek sighs. “Can you even see anything?”

“Would you stop bitching for a minute? Here, _Lumos_ , now I can see just as well you.”

The tip of Stiles’ wand flares brightly yellow, and in the next second Derek has Stiles pressed up against an oak tree, hands fisted in his cloak.

“Explain,” he growls out, eyes flickering red.

“Uh, the spell? Pretty sure you learned it as a First Year,” Stiles stutters out, and his fingers come up to curl against Derek’s.

“No. Your magic. It smells like — why would it — ”

“Oh, yeah, I read somewhere that you guys can smell magic,” Stiles says. “It’s not a bad smell, is it?” He tries to take a sniff of his wand, and Derek lets him drop; straightens the cloak around his neck.

“No,” Derek says. “Strangely familiar, but not bad.”

And there’s that sour cherry scent again.

“You’ve been following me, on the full moons.”

“Uh — ”

“How?”

“How do you think?” Stiles says, shrugging. “I’m an Animagus, duh.”

“You’re fifteen,” Derek says. “You could’ve killed yourself!”

“Actually, I’m not fifteen for another month and also — prodigy, remember?”

“Show me,” Derek says, and lets his eyes flash red again.

“You could try asking nicely, you know,” Stiles says, and Derek gets ready to growl at him when Stiles vanishes with a soft _poof_ before reappearing as a —

Derek can’t help it; he bursts out laughing.

Suddenly Stiles is standing in front of him again, looking equal parts pissed off and enthralled.  “Hey, it’s not that funny! You should see what Scott turns into.”

“No,” Derek says, once his laughter subsides. “I think I’m good with just you.”

“It’s your hair,” Stiles says a moment later, looking a little guilty. “Your wolf hair, anyway. I needed something for my wand and you kind of shed all over the place, so...”

“Yeah, I figured,” Derek says, except he hadn’t; not fully, not until now.

***

Full moons after that are — fun.

Almost like having a pack again. Almost like —

And Derek cuts the thought off before it can begin to take root.

***

He signs up for the pre-Auror track with Boyd for his eighth year, mostly because he doesn’t know what else to do.

Stiles plunks his breakfast tray next to Derek’s their first day back, sighing dramatically.

“Scott’s gone dark-side,” he says. “Every other word that comes out of his mouth is ‘Allison.’ I’d suspect a love potion, except I’m pretty sure his obsession extends beyond anything mere magic could accomplish.”

Derek doesn’t say anything. He has no right to comment.

He keeps expecting Stiles to go off with someone else, pair up like all the others. But he never does.

Stiles is loyal, he knows. But lately Stiles has also been smelling vaguely of ash, and that makes Derek hesitate.

***

They’re in the forest again, looking for bloodroot this time.

“Can’t Scott or Erica help you out with this?” Derek asks.

“Scott’s busy staring deeply into Allison’s eyes,” Stiles says. “Plus he’s terrified of spiders. And Erica’s got Dueling Club tonight.”

He spots a patch of white flowers and nudges Stiles towards.

“Thanks, man,” Stiles says. “Job goes a lot quicker with your wolfy senses.”

Stiles crouches down, picking out the freshest blooms and forming a small bouquet.  

He works quietly for a while, then slants a look up at Derek.

Derek glares back.

“Hey, don’t be like that,” Stiles says. “I just wanted to ask what you wanted for your birthday. Finally managed to get the date out of Boyd.”

Derek sighs and crouches down next to Stiles. “I don’t want anything, Stiles. Just — leave it alone. Please.”

“Are you sure?” Stiles asks, and there’s something different about his voice, something as sweet and deadly as the flowers scattered across his lap.

Derek meets his gaze, then drops his eyes as Stiles wets his lips, soft pink tongue darting out.

“Kate Argent,” Stiles whispers, and Derek can’t look away from the shape his mouth makes on her name. “I know where she’s buried. I could bring her back for you, if you wanted. If you wanted to be the one to kill her, this time. Or — your uncle. I can’t do much with the ones who died in the fire but I could bring your uncle back, and — I could fix him, maybe, if you asked me to try.”

“How?” Derek rasps out.

“Magic,” Stiles says, looking down at his hands. “I’m good at it; better than Deaton, better than — anyone, probably. It doesn’t always work the way it should, but I can do some really amazing things with it. Awful things, too.”

And Derek —

Derek catches his chin in one hand, covers Stiles’ mouth with his own before it can say anything else.

He tries to keep it soft, gentle; but Stiles surges under him, tasting like singed cherries and _wolf_ and before Derek can stop himself he’s braced on both elbows over Stiles’ skinny body, biting at his lips and holding him still so Derek can fuck his tongue into Stiles’ mouth.

He tears himself away to breathe, listens to Stiles panting under him.

“Not to, uh, ruin the moment or anything,” Stiles says, working his hips against Derek’s thigh, “But maybe we could move this somewhere a little, _ah_ , less poisonous?”

There are bloodroot petals in Stiles’ hair and crushed under his fingers. The smell of decay and arousal is thick in the air.

“Fine,” Derek grounds out, and lays one palm heavily against Stiles’ groin to still his movements. “But no sex until you’re of age. And no raising the dead, either, fuck.”

***

The end of the year comes too soon for Derek. Boyd is graduating and headed for the Auror Department, and he doesn’t know who else in his year is sticking around for another term — which is essentially Advanced Muggle Studies, SAT prep and drafting “appropriate” Muggle college application essays — but he supposes it doesn’t really matter. He’ll still have Stiles.

Stiles is sitting with Scott and Erica this morning, but whenever he throws his head back to laugh Derek can see the mark on Stiles’ throat and thinks, _Mine_.

“You and your crazy jailbait boyfriend going to be okay next year?” Boyd asks.

“He’s not crazy,” Derek says, and slams his cup down on the table before stalking out of the dining hall.

***

It’s a difficult moon, that June. He snaps at Stiles and chases down a wild rabbit, throwing its carcass into a creek after breaking its neck. He wants to tear something apart, but the only thing big enough is his own body, and Stiles keeps darting in the way before his teeth can meet flesh.

Eventually he manages to run down a deer, wakes up pink and bloodied, with Stiles perched beside him on a tree stump poking at the dead deer’s entrails with a stick.

“I haven’t seen you that angry in a while,” Stiles says.

Derek stares up at the light filtering through the leaves above him. “Yeah.”

“It’s because all your classmates are leaving, moving on, and you’re staying here, huh?”

“I want to stay here,” Derek says.

“Yeah, but you don’t want to want to,” and that — actually makes sense. “Go shower and then say goodbye to Boyd,” Stiles says, “And accept the fact that he’s going to visit, if not to spend time with your sorry ass then to hover intensely near Erica.”

Derek hauls himself up, shaking dirt and leaves from his hair. “Boyd likes Erica?”

“Uh-huh, and grass is green and bumblebees buzz. Honestly, you’re worse than Scott sometimes.”

He snags Stiles’ hand as they walk back to the school, wonders if he needs to apologize for the night before. Stiles lifts up their linked hands to lick Derek’s thumb clean of blood, bumps his shoulder before letting them fall. Derek stays quiet.

***

They have a fight, and a compromise: no sex until Derek’s nineteenth birthday, which is still months before Stiles’ seventeenth.

It doesn’t make sharing a bedroom with him that summer any easier, but for less obvious reasons.

“Shit,” Stiles says, the third time Derek wakes in a panic. “I’m not bleeding, really, I just — I don’t know why it smells like that, it’s just — dreams — ”

“Yeah,” Derek says, trying to slow his heart rate. It’s not just the faint scent of blood. Stiles smells raw, like an open wound. “Must be some pretty bad dreams.”

“Sort of.” Stiles turns away from Derek, buries his face in the pillow. “You’ve never asked, about where I lived before I came here,” he says, muffled.

“Figured you’d tell me if you wanted me to know.”

“California,” Stiles says. “Then Colorado, for — ten months, just about. Then California again, for a few weeks.”

“Okay,” says Derek. “I grew up in California.”

“Hmm.” Stiles lifts up his head, trails one finger along Derek’s jaw. “That must’ve been interesting.” He’s starting to smell like himself again.

Derek nips at him to make him smile, pulls him close until he can feel Stiles breathing against his chest. Stiles doesn’t like being held when he sleeps, but when he’s awake he sometimes tries to burrow beneath him, nose against Derek’s throat and hands tucked under his hips.

“My family,” Derek says, then pauses. He hadn’t intended to speak, but Stiles is looking at him, waiting. “It was hard, learning how to be — normal. Human. And then I had to learn it all again, when I came here.”

“I never learned,” Stiles says, words soft against Derek’s skin, before pressing a kiss to his chest. “I just got good at pretending.”

“Yeah,” Derek says. “That’s what I meant.”

He likes that they haven’t had sex yet; that he can run his hands over Stiles’ body and soothe him back to sleep, keep him safe, and leave it at that. He knows it won’t last much longer, and that’s fine; he just needs to know that it’s possible, something he’s able to do.

***

He gets his own suite of rooms as a Ninth Year, which is nice, except for the part where it gives some of the other students a convenient target for their pranks.

“It’s Matt,” Stiles says. “He’s got a thing for Allison and he thinks you’ll think she’s the one doing this, and he’ll get to — I don’t know, be her knight in shining armor or something. The rest of them are just joining in because they think it’s funny.”

“It’s fine,” Derek says. “It’s not like they can actually hurt me.”

“They set your bed on fire and scrawled ‘The only good wolf is a burnt wolf!’ in blood on the wall,” Stiles says angrily, pointing. “It’s not fucking fine.”

“Stiles,” Derek says, gripping Stiles’ wand arm tight, “It’s fine. They try to set the bed on fire while I’m in it, then it’s a problem.”

“You’re not fucking funny,” Stiles says, and he pushes Derek away from him before storming off down the stairs.

Matt Daehler is in the hospital wing the next evening. Five more Seventh Year boys fall ill before the week is out.

Derek finds Stiles in the library, staring blankly at a book on wave mechanics, of all things.

“Not all of them were involved,” Derek says, sliding into the chair across from him.

“Collateral damage,” Stiles says.

“You picked those mushrooms over a year ago, why — ”

“Always be prepared.”

“They’re dying,” Derek says, trying to get Stiles to look at him. “They’re just kids.”

Stiles shrugs.

Derek pulls out his Muggle Studies notes, spends the rest of the evening sitting quietly at the table.

“I think I’ll spend Christmas break with Morrell,” he finally says.

Stiles doesn’t reply; just slams his book shut and rattles the table in his rush to get up. 

He talks to Morrell the next morning.

“Of course it’s fine,” she says. “I’m sure Isaac will be glad of the company. But perhaps you can do me a favor in the meantime. The students who’ve fallen ill — maybe your sense of smell can provide us with a clue.”

“Maybe,” Derek says. He follows her to the hospital wing, where the air still stinks of the mushrooms Stiles made him carry the summer before last.

“Anything?” she asks, and the peach scent of her magic ripens. Expectant. 

“No,” he says. “Sorry.”

***

Deaton figures out how to heal them, eventually. Derek doesn’t know if Stiles helped. He doesn’t ask.

“Sorry,” says Stiles, two days before Christmas. Derek doesn’t say anything, just takes his hand and leads him to his room. The heating’s been turned off in that part of the building, but a warming charm works well enough.

“I’m not sorry for what I did, but I’m sorry I was such an asshole to you about it,” Stiles says, curling up in his lap on the bed. Derek doesn’t reply, busy rubbing his nose behind Stiles’ ear, pushing Stiles’ robes and shirt up to stroke the soft skin underneath.

“I’m kind of — fucked up, on the inside,” Stiles whispers.

“Yeah,” Derek says. “Just my type, really.”

Stiles makes a wounded noise into his neck, and he runs his hands over Stiles’ back, kisses his forehead.  

“It’s okay,” he whispers into his hair, because Stiles loves him, maybe, and that makes it okay.

***

They don’t have sex on Derek’s birthday, because Derek’s birthday falls on the last night of the full moon, and he can’t risk it.

“There’ll be consequences,” Stiles warns him when Derek says he’s spending the night in the woods, alone. “Sexy consequences, to your dick.”

Derek kisses him, wet and rough; scrapes his cheek against the delicate skin of Stiles’ throat on his way to darken the mark on his neck. His hands keep Stiles’ hips from jerking up at the pressure of teeth.

“Stay,” he says, and gives Stiles another bite for emphasis before leaving the room.

He doesn’t think much about Stiles’ “consequences”; doesn’t make any concrete plans for the following night beyond doing whatever Stiles ask; marking him inside and out with his scent.

So he’s not prepared to be hit with a wave of Stiles’ magic as soon as he enters his room after dinner. It knocks him onto his back on the bed, forces his arms up towards the headboard, where they’re tied to the slats with something that feels like silk but refuses to budge.

His robes and uniform melt away into the air, and he turns head to find Stiles leaning lazily against his dresser. The room smells of wolf, spiced cherries and loam.

“Untie me,” Derek growls, “Now.”

“No, I think I want you to _stay_ ,” Stiles says, vanishing his own clothes with a wave of his wand. “Don’t worry; the ties will disappear after you make me come the first time.”

Derek raises an eyebrow. Stiles just smirks at him, sauntering over to the bed and settling himself on Derek’s thighs. “And this,” Stiles says, curling his fingers around the base of Derek’s dick and squeezing, until Derek is achingly, painfully hard, “Will disappear after — hmm, how many orgasms do you think I missed last night? Three? I’m going to be nice and say three, since it was your birthday and all.”

He lifts his hand but the pressure remains, and Derek’s dick throbs even harder, now covered in a thin sheen of oil.

Stiles stretches himself out, lifts himself up on his elbows to keep his mouth just out of range of Derek’s teeth.

“You don’t get to come until I get what I’m owed,” he whispers, and slams himself down.

Derek’s answering howl gets swallowed up; his arms straining against the bonds. Stiles is warm, tight, wet — and Derek’s eyes flash red but he can’t smell any blood, which means Stiles must have — before — and the thought sends fire spreading through his veins. He lifts his hips up, almost unseats Stiles with the force, but Stiles just laughs in response.

“You’ll need to do better than — _ah_ , that!” Stiles gasps out, but beads of precome are already leaking out of him, and Derek repeats the angle of the thrust, tries to fuck in even deeper.

It doesn’t take long, after that. Stiles bends down to bite at his chest, teeth catching on a nipple, and Derek lets out a roar; spears his hips up as Stiles finally wraps a hand around himself, stripping his dick to match the violence of Derek’s thrusts. He comes with a shout all over Derek’s stomach, sounding almost surprised.

In the next instant, the bonds around Derek’s wrists dissolve and he’s got Stiles on his back, mouth wrapped tight around his dick, sucking him clean.

“Fuck,” Stiles says, “You — _fuck_ ,” sounding wrecked, and Derek lets him slip out for a moment, meets Stiles’ blissed out gaze.

“Before,” he says, voice rough, “You — magic, or?”

And Stiles understands, huffs out, “Magic; wanted you to be the — first, _ah_ — ” as Derek pushes two fingers into him with a pleased rumble.

“Mine,” he grinds out, and swallows him to the root again; lets Stiles fuck into his mouth as long and as hard as he wants until his cock thickens and throbs, releasing a thick stream of come down Derek’s throat.

“Two,” Stiles breathes out, falling back limply onto the bed from where he’d been propped up on his elbows. “Maybe we can take the next one a little slower?”

Derek looks pointedly down at own cock, jutting out between his thighs, angry and red.

“Hey, I warned you,” says Stiles, and Derek stretches out over him, gives him a slow, wet kiss, because — he did warn him, true.

He moves his mouth down, leaves Stiles’ nipples hard and shiny with spit, bites gently at his stomach and licks off the remains of his mess from before.

Stiles’ dick looks soft and spent, lying in a bed of brown curls, so Derek goes down slightly lower, mouths at his balls as Stiles lets out a steady stream of curses above him.

He moves his head down even further, uses his hands to spread Stiles’ thighs apart. He licks inside as deep as he can, stabbing his tongue in with the same violent pace as before, until Stiles is trying to squirm out of his grasp.

This time takes longer, and Stiles sounds almost like he’s sobbing, hands clenched tight in Derek’s hair, but Derek knows better. He shifts his grip and stretches his fingers to graze against the base of Stiles’ dick, lets one fang slip free and presses it carefully against skin already red and raw from his stubble. Stiles curls in on himself as much as Derek’s hands allow, keening and pulsing weakly in response.

 _Three_ , Derek thinks, and the tight band of pressure around his cock and balls disappears, almost makes him come right that instant, but he grips his dick in one clawed fist until the need dies down in immediacy.

“Fuck,” Stiles gasps. “Derek, what — "

He doesn’t give Stiles a chance to finish; lifts his body and rolls Stiles over before pushing him down into the messy sheets until he’s covering every inch of his back. Stiles has no leverage, his hands caught under Derek’s, fluttering weakly.

“Can’t,” Stiles says, voice weak. “Derek, I _can’t_ ,” as Derek pushes into him, into the place where he’s still wet, Derek’s spit and precome mixing in with the oil and leaking out of in a slow, steady dribble.

“Can,” Derek says, biting at his neck and shoulders, “Will.”

He keeps his thrusts slow, deep; rotates his hips to make Stiles jump in his grasp on every outstroke. Stiles clenches around him and he snarls, uses one hand to lift Stiles up so he can’t rub his dick against the sheets anymore. Stiles is half-hard now, and Derek growls in satisfaction, moves faster, harder, while Stiles fucks into empty air and lets out soft, high-pitched whines.

The fire in his veins is burning him from the inside out. His hands are clawed, teeth fanged and eyes red but he needs — he needs —

Stiles lets out a thin, reedy scream, clenching around him painfully tight, and Derek can smell the fresh burst of Stiles’ come hitting the sheets.

Derek’s answering howl rattles the window in its frame, and finally, finally, he lets himself empty out into the body shaking apart beneath his.

It’s quiet, then; blissfully quiet and still, until Stiles thumps weakly at his side. Derek pulls out slowly and moves Stiles to lie on top of him.

“Fuck. You,” Stiles pants out. “That was — you — ”

“I like to exceed expectations,” Derek says, breathing heavily. Stiles smells delicious, and Derek wants to lick him all over, but he’s too tired to move. “You okay?” he asks, even though he’s pretty sure of the answer.

“Peachy,” Stiles says, and shifts to look down at Derek. “Feels weirdly empty, though. Guess your dick made a permanent impression on my ass.”

And Derek’s exhausted, but he summons up the energy to slip two fingers back into Stiles, massages him gently from inside.

“Better?” he asks.

“Hmm,” Stiles says, squirming a little, and he shoves one hand down between them, fingers curling in the hairs above Derek’s dick. “’S good,” he mumbles, yawning, and falls asleep just like that.

Derek stays awake, watches him breathe. Stiles makes a good wolf, he thinks muzzily, and doesn’t bother to correct himself.

***

They spend nearly every night together, after that, and Stiles becomes an expert at sneaking to and from Derek’s room after curfew. They fuck in Stiles’ bed just once, Derek struggling to focus under the threat of others seeing what’s his.

Derek likes running his nose and mouth over every inch of Stiles’ skin. That close, he can make out the faint scents layered on top of Stiles’ usual smell, scents that flicker from day to day, sometimes second to second. Like the fading trails of a thousand different spells.

The only permanent difference is on the skin of Stiles’ right palm, which smells ever-so-slightly rotten. Kate’s hands had a similar smell, he thinks, but a hundred times stronger. Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to be bothering Stiles.

Stiles still wakes up smelling of blood sometimes. But sex softens his edges; makes him more willing to let Derek close.

Bit by bit, Stiles tells Derek his secrets. One night, during the full moon, Stiles tells him a story about the people who hurt him. He lets slip the name of the town where they lived, where he almost died. The following morning Derek wakes up in a strange house covered in blood, Stiles standing over him with wide eyes, moon-bright.

He opens his mouth and Stiles falls onto him, into him, mouth biting and hands grasping until he’s just as filthy as Derek, red-streaked and grinning.

“We should clean up,” Derek says once Stiles lets him breathe.

Stiles moves his wand in a complicated motion, whispers some strange words in Latin.

Derek feels a cold chill pass over him. He’s clean, now, and so is Stiles, but the bodies on the ground remain where they were.

“All done,” Stiles says.

Derek twitches his nose, frowning.

“Yeah, sorry; side-effect of the spell. I just scrubbed our magical signatures off. I did it at the church, too, so we’re good to go.”

“Church? How many people did I kill?” Derek asks, sitting up and trying to figure out where his robes went. He can’t quite orient himself without being able to smell his or Stiles’ magic.

“Nine,” says Stiles. “Too bad, one more and we could’ve gotten the eleventh one free!”

He sounds manic, breath coming too fast. 

“We should go,” he says, standing, and Stiles nods, moving under his arm, holding tight. “Can you Apparate us, or — ?”

“Yeah,” says Stiles, “The spell, it’s cannibalistic. It’ll eat up any magical residue before eventually eating itself, it’s pretty neat; I came up with it myself,” and Derek can’t help but kiss him quiet. They drop down half a mile away from the school, still pressed together.

***

Derek waits for Stiles to bring it up, but he never does. He isn’t sure what to do with the tangle of things inside him without Stiles to unravel it.

Derek doesn’t regret what he did; he can’t, not when he knows that anyone who might even try to hurt Stiles in the future will meet the same fate.

Stiles seems — happy, and at night he smells like himself and like Derek, cherry pie and earth and wolf all mixed together.

So Derek takes the twisted threads of blood and bone and fire (because they’d all tasted like ash to the wolf, like someone was already burning them up), he takes them and ties the loose ends to Stiles, because what else is there to do?

“Mate,” he whispers one night, one month before term ends, and he can feel Stiles smile against his shoulder.

“Yeah, I kind of figured,” Stiles says, and he still doesn’t give a name to what happened, so maybe he’s okay using Derek’s.

“Tell me,” Derek whispers, just to be sure.

“Mate,” Stiles says. He stretches his hand over Derek’s heart, almost like a cage.

***


	3. Chapter 3

**Boy.**

There’s a born-wolf at the Academy. His name is Derek, and he’s three years older than Stiles.

Stiles discovers him the day before term starts, standing outside the school gates — spindly limbs and spiked hair, scowling and surrounded by grasping relatives.

 _Maybe he’s sick_ , Stiles thinks, unsure of what else it could be, until later that night when Deaton explains that Derek is something rare, something that only appears once every two or three hundred years, maybe.

A born-wolf with magic.

***

“Tell me about your parents,” Deaton says in his quiet way, and Stiles thinks: _No_.

“Would you like to tell me a story, Stiles?” Deaton asks the week after. “Any kind of story you’d like.”

“I’m not too good at stories,” Stiles says. “Always get the endings mixed up. You probably have some pretty good ones, huh?”

And Deaton sighs but doesn’t push.

Stiles knows he should be grateful to the man who gives back his words and a world full of new ones. But the air around Deaton is too thick with magic, keeping him hidden, and Stiles is wary of what he can’t see and warier still of anything resembling charity.

There’s not much he can do if things turn sour, but he tries. He studies, he watches; tries to figure out how to get his magic to do what he wants for a change.

And when he discovers the born-wolf, he plans.

***

Once upon time there was a boy named — .

Once upon a time there was a boy. The boy’s father was a deputy, then a security guard, then a body mangled and broken on the side of the road. His story is distressing, but simple enough. The boy’s mother is more complicated.

***

On the second day of classes, a boy with messy dark hair sits down across from Stiles in the dining hall.

“Are you really an internationally-wanted warlock who drank a de-aging potion so you could hide out in school until the heat died down?” he asks.

The blonde girl sitting next to Stiles snorts. “Yeah, because obviously Deaton’s taken up harboring fugitives in his spare time.”

Stiles swallows his mouthful. It’s lunchtime and so far all the other kids have just stared and whispered at him, so he’s willing to cut this guy some slack.

“Yeah, no, sorry,” he says. “Just a regular wizard-in-training. But, uh, that’s actually one of the better theories I’ve heard.”

“I might’ve come up with it myself,” the kid says, reaching for an orange with a grin. “I’m Scott. We have Transfigurations together.”

“Right,” says Stiles. “You’re the one whose turtle exploded.”

The blonde girl laughs and Scott flushes. “Yeah,” he says. “I feel really bad about it. I just — I don’t think I can do those kinds of spells.” He pokes dejectedly at one the sandwiches on the platter in front of him. “I was actually hoping you were a fugitive warlock; then maybe you could show me how to make the spell work, or at least how to survive once I get kicked out of here.”

Stiles lets himself smile, bumping his shoulder against Scott’s. “Hey, I may not be a 400-year old wizard in a ten-year old’s body — and, wow, that sounds bad — but, uh, I’m still pretty good at the spell stuff. I could help you practice today after class, if you want.”

“Really?” Scott asks.

“Yeah,” he says. “I could actually use a study-buddy; I get distracted if I try to work by myself.”

“Cool,” says Scott. “I’ll help you focus, and you’ll help me not explode any more innocent animals.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Stiles says, studying the way Scott’s face lights up with happiness. Really, if he can get anything half as good as Scott’s puppy-dog eyes and easy grin down, he’ll be getting the better end of the deal.

***

Scott’s in the East dorm and Stiles is in the North building next door, which works out because it means Stiles has an excuse to hang out in Scott’s common room instead of his own. His suitemates aren’t too bad, but Jackson is the kind of guy who’d be signing up for the Death Eaters if he’d been born a decade earlier.

“Your parents were Muggles, weren’t they?” Scott whispers when they’re in detention, sorting through Potions ingredients after Stiles made Jackson’s cauldron explode right in his face.

Stiles shrugs. “They weren’t wizards,” he says.

“My dad was a Muggle,” Scott says. “Or, I guess he still is, but I haven’t seen him in like five years. He freaked out when he realized my mom’s a witch.”

Stiles wants to ask what kind of woman would marry a man without telling him something like that, but then remembers all the things his mother never told his dad, about where she came from and why.

“Sucks, dude,” he says instead.

“He was kind of a jerk,” Scott says. “I think we’re better off without him. Doesn’t mean I agree with Jackson, though. Not all Muggles are like that. I’m sure your parents weren’t.”

Stiles hates that word — _Muggle_ — like people who can’t do magic are muddled; silly and weak and in need of protection from themselves.

“My parents were pretty cool,” he says.

“Did they know you could do magic?”

“No.” Stiles points to Scott’s sleeve. “You’ve got a horned slug crawling up your arm.”

Scott lifts his arm to see. “Oh, man, look at him go! D’you think Harris will notice if I smuggle him out in my pocket? I can set him free in the forest after.”

“Still trying to make up for that tortoise, huh?” Stiles says, but he’s already pointing his wand subtly towards the classroom lights, making them flicker and buzz.

***

After the Jackson incident, Harris makes Stiles pair up with Erica, the blonde girl from East who sits next to him at lunch sometimes, and sends Scott to work with her previous partner, Matt.

“Fuck this up and I’ll fuck you up,” she says, pulling her hair into a messy ponytail and looking over the ingredients list in the book.

“Duly noted,” says Stiles. “Also, I’m starting to wonder if maybe I’ve been judging Matt too harshly and all this time his creepiness was just a byproduct of terror.”

“Nah, he’s pretty creepy,” says Erica. “Your buddy Scott might end up in a jar on Harris’s shelf by the end of the year. Only mystery will be who finally snaps and pickles him — Harris, Matt, Jackson or Greenberg.”

“Greenburg’s in the running?”

“Sits behind him in Transfigurations. Prime splatter territory.”

Their hands move quickly while they talk, shredding and chopping and stirring the mixture.

“Done,” says Erica, smiling in satisfaction as their cauldron releases a plume of sweet-smelling smoke.

There’s still thirty minutes to go in the class.

“Guess I’ll get started on the essay for tomorrow,” Stiles says.

“Or we can bottle this stuff up and use the rest of the time to make something...interesting,” Erica says, eyeing the ingredients cabinet.

“I have a feeling I’m going to regret this,” Stiles says slowly, but he’s already following her to the back of the room, keeping an eye out for Harris, who’s busy yelling at two kids whose cauldron is overflowing with black bile.

“Only if you bleed easily,” Erica says, and Stiles realizes he’s just gained another friend.

***

“I can’t believe you’re doing better in Math than I am,” Erica grouses, grabbing the test out of Scott’s hands. “You couldn’t even manage an _Alohomora_ charm until Stiles spent three hours practicing it with you!”

“Hey, just because you’re Muggle-born and I’m not — I mean, it obviously doesn’t work the other way,” Scott says, grabbing the paper back. “You and Stiles are way better at all the magic stuff.”

“Stiles _would_ be way better if he ever actually tried,” Erica says, and Stiles looks up from his comic book long enough to flip a finger at her. “As it is, he’s only slightly above average.”

They’re in the courtyard, soaking up the last warm day before autumn begins in earnest.

“Anyway,” Erica says, “It’s not like I have some sort of advantage. I missed a lot of school because I had — I was sick a lot.”

“What do you mean?” Scott asks, sitting up from his sprawl. “Are you okay now? My mom’s a nurse at St. Hilga’s, I can Floo her if — ”

“She’s fine,” Stiles says, because it’s obviously true. “I’m sure St. Hilga’s was the first place Deaton told her to visit when he wrote her acceptance letter, and they fixed her up good as new.”

“Yeah,” Erica says. There’s something sharp and brittle in her smile. “Would’ve been nice if they’d fixed it before, but I guess better late than never.”

“I thought Muggles were pretty good at the medicine stuff,” Scott says, looking curiously at her and Stiles.

“Depends on the Muggles,” Stiles says, at the same time that Erica says, “It depends on the stuff.”

***

The one class where Stiles does make an effort is also the one he’s currently failing.

“Listen, kid,” Finstock says, running his hands through his hair. “I’ve seen Squibs do a better job on a broom than you. I’m pretty sure your average Muggle could fly higher.”

“I’m trying!” Stiles says, and for once it’s actually true. “It just — I don’t know, it just doesn’t want to go.”

“Wrong!” says Finstock. “The broom _always_ wants to go. It’s you that’s the issue. Figure it out by Monday.”

Stiles takes the broom back to his dorm, then drags it out to the forest once everyone else is asleep. The problem with flying is that it doesn’t work through his wand, and his magic is its usual ornery self without the wand to guide it. He walks until he spots a few of the wolf’s stray hairs, shimmering faintly in the dark, and weaves them into the broom’s bristles.

Then he straddles the broom again, clutching it tight between his thighs. “Okay, go,” he says, and for the first time manages to lift about a foot in the air before toppling back to the ground.

“Okay then,” he says. On Monday he tells Finstock that if he doesn’t give Stiles a passing grade, not only will he have to deal with Stiles again next term, but Stiles won’t be able to help Scott with his lessons and there’s no way Scott will be able to maintain the B average necessary to try out for Quidditch without him.

Finstock gives him a C+, and a wide berth whenever they run into each other in the hallways.

***

Despite being the only First Year on any of the teams, Scott leads East to an easy victory over the other dorms. Finstock is reportedly trying to decide which scouts to invite for a preview next spring.

Stiles likes watching the games, especially when East plays against West, because that means he gets to look at Derek while he sits stiffly in the stands.

“You’re cheering for the wrong team again,” Erica says, elbowing Stiles in the stomach.

“Hey, that save was awesome,” Stiles says, still clapping for Boyd. “Also, North’s already out of the running, so I’m just here as an impartial observer.”

“Uh-huh,” says Erica. She frowns up at Scott. “He should’ve gotten the Snitch already. West scores a few more goals and it won’t even matter.”

“He knows what he’s doing,” Stiles says.

“I would’ve tried out for the team,” Erica says, still glaring at Scott. “But then you wouldn’t have anyone to keep you company while you ‘impartially observe’ a certain werewolf. You’re not subtle, you know.”

Stiles shrugs. “Wasn’t trying to be.”

***

In the summer the other students leave and Deaton once again spends his days carefully crafting personalized admissions notes for the incoming First Years.

Stiles wanders around the forest, gathering strands of wolf hair when he comes across them. He doesn’t have any need of them, but they’re — pretty. Longer than anything he’s ever seen on a dog; silky and black with traces of the same green-silver shine that surrounds Derek. Stiles also takes note of which plants are growing where, though he leaves them alone for the moment.

He practices some of the harder spells he’s read about, having cast a variant of _Confundus_ to rid himself of the Trace earlier in the year. It took him a week to figure out what the dirty yellow specks on all the younger students’ hands signified, and another month to create a spell that would dispel them without doing any further damage.

A targeted _Avada Kedavra_ would have been neater, but Stiles is wary of the Unforgivables. Too easy to track even without a Trace, according to the books. 

He pauses at a clump of flowers, considering. “ _Crucio_ ,” he whispers at a daisy. It shudders and withers before his eyes, but that’s not what has Stiles’ attention. He’s staring at the black ooze dripping from all sides of his wand, getting all over his hand.

“Well, guess that explains it,” Stiles says. Cleaning charms don’t seem to do any good. The ooze dissipates over the course of the day, though it takes a week for it to disappear altogether. Stiles’ right palm continues to carry a stain, black and vaguely spider-shaped.

He tramples the daisy before he goes back to Deaton’s. His mom grew daisies in their front yard before they lost the house. The flowers bloomed into her hands though she never seemed to notice, just like she never noticed the way cups would hover in the air for a second to let her catch them before they fell.

Stiles noticed, though. Stiles broke a lot of cups and crushed a lot of flowers the year his dad died, but this is the first that he’s tortured on purpose.

***

Erica makes East’s Quidditch team in their second year, and Scott starts to look slightly harried after practice. Stiles comes out by himself to watch their games against West.

Derek’s always easy to spot in the stands; there’s a negative space around him where the other students’ magic crowds in. Derek’s makes a thin green and silver outline around him, like a transparent shield. It doesn’t unfurl in thick ripples like Scott’s, or pulsate quickly like Erica’s. It’s just — there. Held tight and still. Born-wolf magic is said to be nearly impossible to track, and Stiles can see why.

He wonders what would happen if Derek ever cast an Unforgivable.

***

Stiles is only a Third Year when Professor Argent takes an interest in Derek. He’s too young to present himself as an option, but he can tell that there’s something not quite right in how she looks at the wolf, knows now what the coal-black color of her hands signifies. Whatever it is, it can’t last.

He can’t follow Derek or cast a surveillance charm without Derek knowing, and he spends fruitless hours trying to mask the scent of his magic — difficult, since he can’t tell if it smells to begin with — when Argent kills Derek’s family and gets her throat ripped out by his uncle.

“You think Deaton’s going to take him in?” Scott whispers the morning they all find out. Derek’s sitting at the breakfast table with Boyd at his side, stirring a bowl of oatmeal but not actually eating.

“Isaac’s in his year and he stays with Morrell,” Erica says.

“Derek’s not going to stay with Morrell,” Stiles says. “He’ll probably just go with Boyd.”

Scott pokes at his oatmeal with a spoon. “I never got why you hate Morrell so much,” he says. “Lydia’s the only one who gets better grades in her class.”

“I don’t hate her,” Stiles say, “We just share a mutual state of antipathy and distrust.”

“Except you’re twelve years old and she’s a full-grown witch,” Erica says. “You shouldn’t be sharing anything.”

“Whatever,” Stiles says, grabbing an apple. “It’s not like I’ll have to deal with her after this year. No more Latin and I’m not about to sign up for Divination.”

Derek does take Divination, though, and he might gravitate towards Morrell if he can’t spend his breaks with Boyd. Stiles may have to speed things up a bit.

***

Stiles spends the rest of Third Year waiting for Boyd to leave Derek’s side so he can talk to him alone. It doesn’t happen. Boyd even quits the Quidditch team; hovers behind Derek like a menacing shadow.

Stiles thinks of the bag of plants he has stashed under a rock in the forest, but decides against using them. Derek likes Boyd. Stiles should learn to like Boyd, too.

***

After a long, frustrating summer that Stiles spends figuring out how to erase the traces of Derek’s magic on the wolf hairs he leaves behind (easy) and the traces of Stiles’ own presence in the woods (a work in progress), Stiles finally sees Derek sitting by himself in the courtyard.

He turns around and tracks down Boyd in the library.

“Hi,” he says, giving him his best Scott-smile.

Boyd doesn’t look impressed. “Studying,” he says.

“Dude, it’s the first day of classes!”

“What do you want, kid?” Boyd asks. He sounds tired.

“Way too much to enumerate,” Stiles says. “But in terms of what I want from you, specifically...”

Boyd gives him a considering look. “I’m not introducing you to Derek.”

“What? No, of course not,” Stiles says. “That’s way too forward, betrayal of your friendship, et cetera. No, I just want you to mention my name to him at some point, acquaint him with my general existence.”

 “Why?” Boyd asks.

“Uh, because Derek should at least have the opportunity to decide if he wants to be friends?”

“I meant,” Boyd says, leaning forward on his elbows, “Why should I do anything for you?”

“Are we — are we bargaining right now?” Stiles asks.

“Right now you’re not doing anything besides annoying me,” Boyd says.

“Okay,” Stiles says, “How's a week’s worth of Potions essays sound? Guaranteed A+ stuff, all in your handwriting.”

“Two weeks,” Boyd says, and his smile is all teeth. “And you stay the fuck away from Derek unless he comes to you first.”

“Deal,” Stiles says.

He breaks his promise less than a month later, when Derek wakes up in the infirmary after the full moon.

***

Derek seems to be doing worse this year than the one before. Stiles tries to remember what his mother’s books said about the grieving process, but it’s been a while.

The days after the full moons are especially bad, even if Deaton never needs to levitate him to the infirmary again.

Stiles spends the summer after his fourth year reading up on Animagi. 

***

“I don’t know about this,” Scott says in early September. He’s standing as far away from the potion as possible, as though breathing in its fumes is already more than he’s willing to risk.

“What could possibly go wrong?” Stiles asks. “And don’t start listing all the horror stories your mother’s told you, okay? That was a rhetorical question.”

“Deaton’s going to be pissed if you end up killing yourself,” Erica says. “Especially if you, like, turn into a blue whale and take out half the school with you.”

Scott looks even more horrified.

“It’ll be fine,” Stiles says. “That’s why you guys are here. If I turn into something aquatic, Scott, you grab me and throw me into that cauldron full of water. I start growing really huge, Erica, and you hit me with your best _Reducio_.”

“And if you start choking or having spasms?” Erica asks.

“Then you call Deaton,” Stiles says. “And run before he finds you here.”

He downs a thimbleful of the potion before they can say anything more, wincing at the taste. In the next instant it feels like he’s falling, and then the room becomes simultaneously huge and stifling.

He tries to open his mouth but its shape feels all wrong, and he gets a sudden urge to stretch out his arms, so he does, only they feel strange too.

Cocking his head, he thinks about his human body, the robes he was wearing, and turns back into himself with a gasp.

“Well?” he asks Scott and Erica, who are staring at him.

“You’re — some kind of crow?” Erica says hesitantly.

Scott shakes his head, and a laugh comes bursting out. “Magpie,” he says. “He’s a magpie!”

Stiles had been hoping for a fox. He’d spent the entire summer preparing for it, doing the visualization exercises, brewing the stupidly complicated potion.

“It’s kind of cute,” Erica says. “You even have little spots on your belly, like moles.”

“And, hey,” Scott says, “Now you’ll be able to fly!”

“Plus I’m not dead,” Stiles says, which is the only real upside he’s seeing right now.

“Also that,” Scott says. “Hey, do you think I can — ” He gestures at where the rest of the potion is still bubbling away.

“That’s what we’re here for,” says Stiles.

***

Stiles makes Scott and Erica promise never to come out on full moons. They spend their weekends rambling around in the forest while the other Fifth Years visit the nearby village.

“This’ll be useful if any of us ever have to go on the run from the law,” says Scott, shaking leaves from his hair after transforming back.

“Yeah, because a jaguar on the Eastern seaboard’s going to go unnoticed,” Erica says sarcastically. “At least bears are a dime a dozen around here.” Stiles knows she’s ridiculously fond of her fuzzier self, as she calls it; she even bought a wizarding camera and had Stiles take a picture. 

Stiles tries not to be too bitter about the whole thing, even though he still can’t really fly; just flits from branch to branch while staying close to the ground. At least he’s never gotten a paw stuck in a beehive (Scott) or a tail caught in some brambles (Erica).

And he’s faster than Derek’s wolf-teeth, which is an important consideration.

 

***

“Derek’s failing Potions,” Boyd tells him outside the dining hall later that autumn.

“Okay,” Stiles says. “Not much I can do if I’m supposed to leave him alone, though.”

Boyd glares at him. “Fix it,” he says, “Or admit you were lying about wanting to be his friend.”

“That was less of a lie and more of an understatement,” Stiles says, “But I’ll see what I can do.”

Suggestion spells are only taught at the Auror Department to full-grown wizards. Protections against suggestion spells are an equally important focus of the curriculum. But wards can only do so much when Stiles can see exactly where they are, and can send a thin thread of magic to dart in between them.

“How would you feel about tutoring Derek Hale in Potions?” Deaton asks, snagging one of Stiles’ sleeves as he makes his way to class.

“Sounds like my type of challenge,” Stiles says. “Also sounds like you might be trying to get rid of me via werewolf mauling, but I’m willing to overlook that.”

***

Derek actually has a sense of humor, which is a surprise. His feelings towards Stiles seem to be composed primarily of tolerance and curiosity, and Stiles makes sure to keep his magic to himself during their sessions.

“How did you and Derek ever become friends, anyway?” he asks Boyd during their weekly Derek-status talks in an alcove near the kitchens.

“Some kid kept harassing him, telling him he belonged in the zoo, leaving dog biscuits in his bed, that kind of thing,” Boyd says, snagging a brownie from one of the House Elves scurrying by.

“And?”

“He doesn’t go to this school anymore,” Boyd says, giving Stiles a hard look.

“Huh,” Stiles says. “Doesn’t explain why you chose to be friends with him, though.”

“My grand-dad was a born-wolf.” Boyd breaks the brownie in two and gives Stiles half. “His pack kicked him out when he married a witch. I figured he’d want me to look out for Derek.”

“Wow, you’re really just a marshmallow under that terrifying exterior,” Stiles says, backing away quickly at Boyd’s glare. “What I meant was — have you ever met my friend Erica?”

***

Erica joins the Dueling Club, which in addition to Quidditch practice means Stiles only really sees her at mealtimes.

When she doesn’t show up for dinner, he assumes she’s just catching up on her homework. Then she’s missing from breakfast and lunch the next day, and Scott’s been looking furtive and miserable.

“If you don’t tell me what’s wrong I can’t fix it,” he tells Scott.

“She made me promise not to say anything,” Scott says. “She said — it’s not a big deal.”

“Scott,” Stiles says.

“Jackson,” he finally whispers. “You know how Danny does all the computer stuff? He had him look up Erica after she humiliated him in the last game and they found an old video of her — she was shaking on the ground, and she — it looked like she — ”

“Okay,” Stiles says. “And I’m guessing he showed the video to all the other Fifth Years except me?”

“Erica only found out about it a couple of days ago,” Scott says. “I made Danny delete the whole thing as soon as I heard — I think he felt pretty bad, too.”

“Right,” says Stiles. “I just remembered that I need to take care of something.”

He gets up from the bench, strides over to where Jackson is sitting across from Lydia and Danny, and aims his wand at Jackson’s torso.

“Let’s see how much you like not having any control over your bodily functions, asshole,” he mutters.

He whispers the spell and a dark brown beam erupts from the tip of Stiles’ wand. Jackson jumps up from the table in the next instant, hands trying to cover the rapidly spreading wetness on the front of his robes before he goes pale and a stench fills the air.

Scott starts laughing from where Stiles left him, and soon the entire school joins him. Stiles keeps walking until he’s out the door, ignoring the professors shouting for order. He was supposed to meet Derek at the library five minutes ago.

***

None of the professors saw what happened, and none of the students who did are talking. Erica shows up at breakfast the next day and throws a blueberry muffin at Stiles’ face, which he guesses is her way of saying thanks.

The morning after, Lydia corners Stiles in the common room. She’s twirling her hair around a finger, looking bored. “It’s been two days,” she says. “While I appreciate the poetic justice of the whole thing, we have a game against West tomorrow, and we don’t have a chance at winning without Jackson.”

“My heart bleeds for you, really,” Stiles says. “You care so much about the game, you undo it. I know you know how; you heard what the spell was.”

“Can’t,” Lydia says, examining her nails. “Then he’ll know that I was letting him suffer and he’ll do that thing where he pouts for a week and starts flirting with that redhead in South. Which, incidentally, is why I was letting him suffer.”

“I’m still not hearing a reason for why I should help him out,” Stiles says, but he’s following her out the door regardless. There’s really not much sense in keeping the curse going if Jackson’s locked in a bathroom in the infirmary.

***

Stiles tries to spend as little time in his common room as possible after that, but Scott’s and Erica’s is off-limits ever since Allison Argent transferred from Salem (as proof that her family has nothing against born-wolves, according to Scott; because of something involving another Salem student and a crossbow, according to Erica).

Allison’s also in East, and while her magic is spiked in a generally threatening way rather than aimed at anything in particular, Stiles keeps his distance. The last thing he needs is to start smelling like her.

Unfortunately, he can’t just go straight from the library up to bed, either. Lydia’s taken a liking to him, presumably because she enjoys watching Jackson tense up whenever he’s near.

“Stiles!” she calls out as he tries to slip past their group. “We’re talking about Muggles and whether the whole secrecy act makes sense anymore.”

“Okay,” says Stiles, perching on the edge of an armchair. “And you need my opinion because — ?”

“Jackson and I are both pure-bloods, and Danny and Greenberg are both Muggle-borns. You can be our tie-breaker since no one knows what in Morgana’s name you are.”

“You do know how to flatter a guy,” Stiles says drily. “I assume Jackson’s already spoken out against Muggles in general?”

“Not the ones who are related to witches and wizards,” Jackson says, glancing at Danny but keeping his wand pointed towards Stiles. “At least they have a stake in the game. But the other ones...”

“What, you think we should just kill them?” asks Greenberg.

“We’re already killing them,” Danny says. “Or letting them die, anyway. That’s my whole point. Just think about how many lives could be saved if they knew about our spells and potions.”

“They’d burn us all alive if they knew,” Jackson snaps back.

“Some of them, sure,” Stiles says, getting up from the chair. It’s late and he needs to rest up for the full moon tomorrow. “But not all of them.”

“Oh, well, that clears things up,” says Lydia. “All we have to do is figure out which ones aren’t okay with magic and — then what?”

“Burn them first,” says Stiles, shrugging.

***

Derek chooses to stay with Morrell over Deaton that summer, but at least he comes over for dinner sometimes.

Stiles takes him out to the woods afterwards, to places more suitable for wolves. He thinks they’re friends now, maybe. Sometimes Derek looks at him in a way he doesn’t fully understand. It’s not the way Scott looks at Allison, or Erica looks at Boyd.

He decides it’s as good a time as any to let Derek smell his magic again. 

“Show me,” Derek demands, eyes turning red, but Stiles knows there’s no reason to be scared.  

“You could try asking nicely, you know,” he says, but lets his magic funnel through his wand and spread out over his body, feeling himself shrink down.

He manages to stay airborne for a few seconds before the familiar fear fills him, and he switches back before he can hit the ground.

Derek’s laughing. Stiles has never heard him laugh before. It’s nice. Except for the part where he’s laughing at Stiles, but whatever.

“It’s your hair,” Stiles tells him, even though Derek’s obviously connected the dots on that one. There are probably rules against using parts of sentient magical creatures without getting their permission first, but Derek doesn’t look angry. Strangely wistful, but not angry.

“I should get back to Morrell’s,” Derek finally says.

“Or you could sleep over,” Stiles says, giving him an exaggerated wink.

Derek’s eyes drop down to his mouth. “Maybe another time,” he says, and Stiles thinks: _Soon_.

***

He doesn’t tell Derek why he needs the foxglove they’d picked; it’s not something he can explain without having to tell him about everything else, and it’s still too early for that.

He stews the foxglove for a week in pickled toad. Adds a sprig of violets and a handful of mermaid scales. It’s a recipe from one of the books Deaton keeps behind wards, ancient and pulsing blood-red. A book about hunting born-wolves.

The potion’s meant to render them helpless to the brewer’s magic and insensitive to its smell. Stiles has no plans to give it to Derek, but he pours it into a small flask to keep in his robes just the same.

  _Know your limits_ , his dad used to say. Stiles needs the vial to remind him that he doesn’t have any.

***

Sixth Year and Stiles starts to get restless. It bursts out of him during the full moons, and he’ll force his wings to work, to take him higher, before gliding down towards Derek.

He spends more and more nights out in the woods, letting his magic flow through his fingertips and erupt in bright flashes and sparks.

“You ever feel like you’re about to explode?” he asks Scott before their Muggle Studies class.

“Yeah, but my mom says it’s a normal part of being a teenager,” Scott says, and Stiles has to stifle his laugh when the professor walks in.

They start a unit on Muggle Religion, and the restlessness becomes an itch, and the itch becomes a burn.

“It’s kind of like magic,” Scott says, working on an essay. “Right? Except if nothing happens, they just try again.”

“When nothing happens, not if,” Stiles says, staring absently out the library window.

“Did you have to go to one of these church places?” Scott asks.

“Yeah,” says Stiles. “For a little while.”

***

That night he sets his first fire. There’d been twelve of them, like the Apostles. Twelve pinecones make a small blaze, easily hidden.

The Elders, his mother called them, before telling him to be polite. Saying it was only going to be for a little while, no more than a month, just until she figured some things out.

 _He’s dead_ , Stiles said, sullen and angry. _There’s nothing else to figure out._

 _It’s been three weeks_ , he shouted during one of their fights. _What’s another month going to change?_

 _I hate it here_ , he said, soft and low as she kissed him goodnight. The only time he’d made her cry.

***

“Derek’s birthday is coming up,” Boyd tells him in early March. “He doesn’t know that I know, so don’t make a big deal out of it.”

“It’s like you don’t even know me,” Stiles says, raising a hand to his heart. “But seriously, what price am I paying for this unexpected but welcome bit of information?”

Boyd gives him a look.

“Yeah, no,” Stiles says. “Unlike Derek, I require verbal communication.”

“Erica,” Boyd says.

“Verbal communication involving actual verbs, and maybe a direct object of some kind,” Stiles clarifies when Boyd doesn’t say anything else.

Boyd huffs out a breath. “Do you know what kind of flowers she likes?”

Stiles blinks at him. “Erica’s not exactly a flowers kind of girl,” he says. “But she has a weak spot for the ones with weird names. There’s a patch of bloodroot way deep in the forest, they look kind of like daisies. I can get you some next time I’m out with Derek?”

Boyd raises his eyebrows. “That’s what you two get up to when he’s out all night? Picking flowers in the woods?”

“Hey, you have your wooing methods, I have mine,” Stiles says.

 ***

Flowers won’t get him very far with Derek, Stiles knows. He’d like to get him something for his birthday, but wolves aren’t like wizards when it comes to gifts.  

 _What does Derek want?_ he thinks. _What would I want if I were Derek?_

It comes to him in an instant. _Argent._ Of course.

And then, because Derek isn’t Stiles, he considers Derek’s uncle as well.

Bodies are easy enough to reanimate. Minds are more difficult. Minds not ravaged by insanity, historically impossible. But Stiles is willing to try. The thought settles him, calms down his magic.

He stops setting fires.

***

The first time Derek kisses him, Stiles is too busy holding on to feel much more beyond a shuddery kind of pleasure. After that, it feels kind of strange, like his magic is about to leak out of him again. It’s nice, but weird. His body knows what to do for the most part, even if Stiles can’t always manage to corral his thoughts into anything coherent.

They’re outside in the woods near the end of term. It’s a warm, heavy day, but pleasant in the bubble of Stiles’ cooling charm. 

Derek nips his ear, breathes heavily against his hair. Stiles puts his stained hand against Derek’s chest and Derek grabs it, presses a kiss into his palm. Stiles carefully doesn’t react. Derek’s nose isn’t as sensitive as Stiles’ sight, he's learned.

“You’re staying with me and Deaton this summer, right?” Stiles says, because he needs to say something.

“You sure that’s a good idea?” Derek asks. He shifts back so he can see Stiles’ face as they talk. It still makes Stiles nervous, sometimes, the way Derek likes to look at him.

“Sure,” Stiles says. “I mean, you know, apart from the awkward boners and blue balls. But any amount of sexual deprivation is worth having you by my side, Buttercup.”

“No,” Derek says, and sets his mouth to Stiles’ neck again.

“No, _ah_ , what?” Stiles says, hands curling against Derek’s shoulders. “No awkward boners or no staying with me this summer?”

“No stupid pet names,” Derek says, and he scrapes a canine over Stiles’ pulse. Stiles drags his head back up, brings their mouths together.

Sometimes it feels like he wants to pour his body into Derek’s. It’s an odd thought; unexpected. He settles for gripping him hard enough to bruise, if only for a second. _Know your limits_ , his dad used to say _._

***

He didn’t know he was having nightmares until he wakes up Derek with their smell.

“Sorry,” he says, the first time it happens that summer. “Sorry.”

It’s like he can’t say anything else, until the word loses all meaning.

_Sorry I didn’t see you were sick. Sorry I couldn’t get to the phone in time. Sorry sorry sorry sorry._

“It’s okay,” Derek says. “Stiles. It’s okay.”

Stiles takes a deep breath, then another. “Right,” he says. “So I guess this might be an issue.”

He doesn’t remember his dreams, but Derek says they smell like blood. Stiles can’t bring himself to ask if the blood smells it’s like his or not.

Once upon a time there was a boy. The boy had a mother whose hands were magic but they stopped working when his father died; couldn’t keep anything in their grasp.

His uncle had been the one to find him, trying to reach the phone they kept on top of the cabinets. His mother had been barely breathing by that point, her gasps drowned out by the women praying around her.

He’d locked Stiles in the hall cupboard, and Stiles pounded against the door until his fists were bruised. Someone started to cry in the bedroom. He thought about the cups. Thought: _I just need to get to her. Please._ He tried to picture her face, felt a rush of anger. If she could — but she couldn’t save his dad, couldn’t fix herself, couldn’t find them another place to go. He screamed, threw his whole body against the door. There’s a sound, then, like the cracking of bone, and then a sharp, sudden pain that flared out from inside, consuming; then — darkness.

He woke up in the church basement, his uncle standing over him and frowning.

They didn’t tell him what happened. He saw the sheets before they burned them, soaked dark red, and at first he couldn’t tell if the red was actually there or if it was something else only he could see. Like the trails of orange sloughing off his skin in waves. The hallucinations didn’t bother him too much. Nothing did, at that point.

When Stiles tells his story to Derek, he leaves out the part where he makes his mother bleed out in her bed.   

***

Morrell starts watching him even more closely in his seventh year, but Stiles isn’t worried. He’s being quiet, for now.

It’s only when he sees the damage done to Derek’s room that he feels his magic threaten to overflow again. The depth of his anger surprises him, but maybe it shouldn’t. Derek is his now, or almost.

Erica sneaks into his common room that evening, tells him she’s looking for Daehler and his gang.

“They’re tasting his new batch of Firewhiskey,” she says, eyes bright. She’s been bored recently, now that Boyd’s at the Auror Department down south.

Stiles puts down his Physics book and scrunches his nose. “Seriously?” he asks. “You really want to imbibe something made by a guy who never washes his hands after Potions?”

Erica still looks tempted, so Stiles takes her hand and pulls her down to the couch next to him. “Anyway, I need your advice about something,” he says.

“This isn’t relationship crap, is it?” Erica asks, wary. “Because I thought we’d agreed that Scott was our go-to guy for that stuff.”

“Yeah, no,” Stiles says. “I need to figure out a locking charm for my trunk that has enough of a bite to convince certain wizards — certain wizards who may or may not be Jackson — to leave it alone, but won’t get me in trouble will Deaton.”

“Huh,” says Erica. “So you need something awful but temporary. Well, let’s consider the options...”

***

He visits them in the infirmary, once. The next morning he brushes against Deaton’s shoulder in the halls and sends a suggestion of a certain book into his mind. Derek’s right; they’re just kids. And he can always teach them another lesson, if he needs to.

***

He spends February reading up on sex spells with a determined-looking Erica and a beet-red Scott.

“We’re going to get in so much trouble for this,” Scott says, but he doesn’t take his eyes off the diagram in the book.

“Sacrifices need to be made in the pursuit of excellence,” Erica says, and she moves her wand in the shape depicted. “Too bad we can’t practice this stuff on each other.” They all grimace simultaneously.

“I still don’t understand why I can’t invite Allison to our study sessions,” Scott says again.

“Because we don’t need a live demonstration,” Stiles says. “Now shush and turn the page.”

***

The morning after he has sex for the first time, Stiles wakes up with a start. He sits up in the bed, breaking Derek’s hold on him. He doesn’t remember going to sleep.

“Shit,” he whispers, and runs a hand through his hair.

“Hmm?” Derek asks, reaching out a hand to trail over Stiles’ thigh. He’s soft and blurry from sleep, and Stiles has to look away from him.

“I feel like maybe we should establish some ground rules for our sex life,” Stiles says, staring at Derek’s curtains.

Derek hums out another sound, shifts his body closer to Stiles', curling around it.

“Last night,” Stiles says. “You could’ve — ”

“Hey, no,” Derek says, catching Stiles’ chin and meeting his eyes. “You’re safe with me.”

That’s not at all what Stiles had been getting at.

“You — you’re safe with me, too,” Stiles says, realizing that it’s true. His magic had left Derek alone in the night, even though Derek had had him pinned in his arms. Huh.

“Werewolf, remember?” Derek says.

“Yeah, whatever.” Stiles pokes his stomach. “Just because you have super-healing powers doesn’t mean no one can hurt you.”

Derek raises an eyebrow and stretches himself out on the bed. Stiles tries not to stare.

“Is this part of sex rules negotiations?” Derek asks. “Do I need to set a hard limit on knife play?”

Stiles snorts out a laugh. “You’re such a fucking asshole. And ‘hard limit’? What the fuck have you been up to?”

Derek sits up, grabs a shirt off the floor and pulls it on. “I’d let you use knives on me if you wanted to,” he says, matter-of-fact.

“You — fucking hell, it’s like eight in the morning!” Stiles says, flailing a bit in the bed. “You can’t just say shit like that and then expect me to calmly get up and shower and have breakfast and  — ”

“Go. Shower,” Derek says, kissing his nose. “I’ll bring you up some coffee.”

Stiles feels his face flush at the kiss. “Just for that, I’m going to get jizz all over your bathroom,” he tells him, watching Derek zip up his pants.

“I’m surprised you have any left, after last night,” Derek says, and he just manages to dodge the pillow Stiles launches at him.

Stiles flops back on the bed, exhausted but jittery. His magic is a fat golden bubble around him, one tendril stretching out to slip through the door after Derek.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he says, glaring at it, before gingerly getting up and heading into the shower.

***

Sex with Derek continues to prove dangerous, not because he’s a werewolf with ridiculous stamina and a penchant for biting, but because orgasms leave Stiles hazy; loose-limbed and careless.

He keeps himself from slipping entirely, though. Even his body manages to time it just right, waking up smelling of blood during the next moon.

Derek’s hands are tight on his hips in the dimly lit shadows of his bedroom, mouth pressed against Stiles’ pulse. 

“After my mother died,” Stiles says, and he’s practiced this enough times in his head that his voice stays steady, “I lived with my aunt and cousins for a while. I was kind of a mess, I guess. So was my magic. I didn’t. I didn’t have any before; it just — exploded, out of nowhere.”

He didn’t know that was what the colors signified back then, just watched the air around his skin shift from orange to green and then flicker through the colors of the rainbow. After about a month the colors started to trail upward and separate into bubbles of light, taking on shapes before settling. Butterflies, once. Reptiles and birds, mostly.

It’s when his cousin Sarah saw him in the storage shed and screamed that Stiles realized she could also see the silver snake curled around his arm.

They prayed. Poured water over him until he dreamed of drowning. After every session, he’d go silent and still for weeks at a time, until the colors did something else, drew another shape in the air. The snake came back, once, hissing hello. Stiles was tired and dazed in the darkness of his basement room, and he greeted him back. That night they came to him with a foul smelling cloth, and when he woke in the morning he was missing his tongue.

After that, snakes and spiders and crows spread over the town like a rolling fog. There was a lot more yelling, and water and oils, but Stiles had been only vaguely aware of what was happening. He spent most of the days asleep, the hunger in his stomach dimming from a sharp pain to a blurry emptiness.

He woke up when he felt a breeze over his face, opened his eyes to see the moon hovering above him. His body was slung between the arms of two of the Elders, their hands tight against his wrists and ankles. Something smelled like it was burning, and then he saw smoke rising from the field behind the gathered crowd, who parted to make a path as the Elders got close.

 _Please_ , Stiles thought, too weak to do much else but close his eyes. _Just this once, please._ The next time he wakes up, it’s to a dog licking his face and he’s in the train yard back home.

But Derek doesn’t need to know all that.

“They — the people in town, they didn’t understand,” Stiles says. “Thought I was possessed or something, I guess. They cut out my tongue. And when that failed, they — they made a huge bonfire in the middle of a field and tried to burn me in it.”

He wants to laugh, because he knows it sounds ridiculous, like something out of the middle ages, but he can’t, not when the smell of ash is always hovering nearby.

“Who,” Derek says, and Stiles can barely decipher the word behind the growl. “Where.”

Stiles tells him.

***

Derek wears Stiles’ wristwatch to dinner a few days later, the one that used to belong to his dad.

“You left it in my room,” he says when he notices Stiles staring. “I thought — do you want it back?”

“Nah, keep it,” Stiles says, eyes still fixed on the thin thread of purple flowing over the surface of the band like a river. A tracking spell, one of Morrell’s, probably. Clever, putting it on something where Stiles’ scent would mask its presence.

He rests his fingers against Derek’s wrist, unravels it with a thought. The back of his neck prickles, and he looks up to find Morrell staring at him from the professors’ table.

He almost laughs. Busted. Whatever she’s suspected about his unusual talents, he’s just confirmed.

Oh, well. Stiles shoots her a grin before turning back to his meal. He’s had her figured out since the first time they’d met; it’s about time she caught up.

He even visits her in the infirmary when she gets ill, even if it's mostly to keep her from saying anything she shouldn’t to Deaton while loopy from healing spells.

***

“Can’t believe I have to stick around here for another year before I can join Boyd at the Auror Department,” Erica says, poking at her Fanged Geranium with her wand that June. “He told me they learned a spell to remove someone’s eyes from their skull! How awesome does that sound?”

“Pretty awesome,” Stiles says. “Not sure why you wouldn’t just go with a simple blinding spell, though.”

“I think mine’s getting ready to bite me,” Scott whispers urgently next to him. “It’s swaying in a really menacing way.”

“That just means it’s happy,” Erica says, taking a look. “Or it likes the way you smell.”

She turns back to Stiles. “You still haven’t told me whether you’re still planning on being here next year.”

“Nope,” says Stiles. “You’ll have to make do with Boy Wonder, here.” He ruffles Scott’s hair and gets a glare in response.

“Is Finstock still upset that you decided not to sign with the Nationals?” Erica asks Scott.

Scott shrugs. “He stared at me really intensely the last time I saw him but he didn’t say anything. I mean, I told him I’d think about it after Eighth Year, but I want to concentrate on Care of Magical Creatures for now.”

“And the fact that a certain Allison Argent is sticking around has nothing to do with it, right?” Stiles says.

“Yeah, just like you leaving has nothing to do with Derek graduating,” Scott says, elbowing him.

“Ugh, I just realized Allison’s going to be in all my classes,” says Erica. “Does that mean I have to start being friends with her?”

“What are you talking about?” Scott asks. “You guys are friends now.”

Erica shoots Stiles an incredulous glance. Stiles shakes his head quickly behind Scott.

“Uh, right,” she says. “I meant — maybe we’ll become even better friends, now.”

“It’ll still suck not having you around,” Scott tells him. “What if we never see each other again?”

“Hey, no worries, I’ll visit,” Stiles says, and he slings one arm over each of their shoulders. “And of course, if something were to happen — something that was completely not my fault, by the way — and suspicions got roused and threats of Veritaserum started being bandied about...”

“Yeah, yeah,” says Erica, shrugging him off and going back to poking at her Geranium. “We’ve got your back.”

“If a bunch of Aurors ever show up on my doorstep and ask where you where the night before, I promise I’ll tell them you were passed out in my basement,” Scott says solemnly, and grabs him in a quick hug.

“You don’t have to make it sound so seedy,” Stiles says, awkwardly patting him on the back.

“Dude, I’d do anything for you, you know that. I got my hand stuck in a beehive for you, remember?” Scott says, laughing and letting him go.

“Yeah, well, same here, minus the bees,” he finds himself saying, and when he looks over Erica’s smiling, like she’s proud of him for something. He doesn’t really understand why.

***

“We could go to New York,” Derek says hesitantly as Stiles looks over a map, marker cap in his mouth.

“Sure,” he says, spitting the cap onto the table. “New York first, but it’ll probably be a little boring.”

He draws a thick black line from the Academy to New York, then pauses. “Maybe Kansas next? Or would North Dakota be better?”

“Better for what?” Derek asks. “Getting lost in a corn field?”

“Adventures, Derek!” Stiles says, spreading his arms out. “Living off the land, meeting new people, looking at giant balls of yarn. That kind of thing.”

Derek bends over the map, nudges at Stiles with his hip. “I’ve always wanted to see the Grand Canyon,” he says.

“You’re so predictable,” Stiles says, sighing. “But fine. Arizona it is.”

Derek takes the marker from him, draws another line on the map.

“You can’t find all of them,” he says softly, and brings Stiles’ hand up to his mouth, pressing his nose against the stain on Stiles’ palm. “There are too many like your uncle, like Argent.”

Stiles feels his throat go dry. His magic surges around Derek in a soft silver cloud.

“I’m not trying to find all of them,” he finally manages to say. “I just want to be ready when they find me.”

“Okay,” Derek says, and he gives Stiles back the marker.

***

He’s flipping through an old handwritten book in the Divination classroom when she finds him.

“Dare I ask what you’re hoping to get from that?” Morrell asks. As always, her magic twists towards Stiles, sharp and threatening.

“Just a name,” Stiles says. He throws the book on her desk, stretches his arms out and goes to examine the shelves lining the room.

“You don’t have to worry about Deaton,” Morrell says, watching him. “He blinds himself to the truth out of love for you.”

Stiles shrugs. “He might forget, one day,” he says.

“To keep his eyes shut?”

“That he loves me.”

Morrell gives him a calculating look, but doesn’t respond. The room goes silent. For Stiles, anyway.

“What’s it sound like?” Stiles asks. He trails his hand over the dusty surface of the crystal balls on a nearby shelf. When he glances up, Morrell is staring at a spot behind him.

“Like a dozen violins clashing together and the howling of a wolf,” she says, smiling wryly. “Though the howling is more recent development.”

Stiles nods, sticks his hands in his pockets and walks towards the door.

“I’ve only known two other wizards who sound like stringed instruments,” Morrell adds. “Deaton’s a cello.”

Stiles figures that deserves some kind of repayment in kind. “It looks kind of like a bruise, to be honest,” he says. “Yours, not Deaton’s. This dense cloud of purple and blue and some yellow. Derek says it smells like peaches, though, so maybe I’m just biased.”

“Whatever it is you’re doing, they’ll figure it out eventually,” she tells him quietly. “And when they do, they’ll send me to stop you, because Deaton won’t. There won’t be much Derek can do to protect you then.”

“You could try stopping me now. But it wouldn’t be as interesting, huh?” He lifts his hand as though tipping an imaginary hat, then leaves Morrell to her star charts.

Morrell is not a witch to underestimate. But she’s expecting Stiles to rely on his magic to get what he wants; to make Derek its shield.

_Know your limits._

Stiles can’t allow boundaries, but he pictures himself as an ocean, Derek an island sheltered in its midst. Full of sharp-toothed beasts and poisonous things.  

 

***

There’s a born-wolf at the Academy. His name is Derek, and he’s three years older than Stiles.

Born-wolves are scarce; born-wolves with magical ability, almost mythical in their rarity.

The plan, like all good plans, is simple. Stiles needs the wolf to see him as its mate. And then — all that strength, all that power, is effectively his.

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Never again will I attempt a story that eventually required a color-coded Excel grid to keep straight. The plan was to get this done before hiatus ended. HA. Anyway: thanks for reading, and concrit welcome!


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